“Every few weeks, fireworks light up the night sky in Cambodia,” The New York Times reports, “set off by scammers to salute their biggest swindles.” What sounds like local color is, in fact, a signal flare for a far more systemic reality: the Huione Group investigation reads less like a crime story and more like a case study in what Chainalysis accurately calls the “professionalization” of crypto money laundering, namely “a full-stack criminal infrastructure” optimized for scale, reliability, and repeatability.
Cambodia’s dollarized economy, lax banking oversight, and corrupt government did not accidentally converge into this role; they actively produced Phnom Penh as “home to a global clearinghouse for money launderers,” a hub whose operating system is not cash, but stablecoins. “Most transactions are conducted in the cryptocurrency Tether,” the Times writes, underscoring how dollar-pegged tokens have become the preferred plumbing of cross-border fraud rather than its antidote.
The pipeline is industrial, not improvised. It starts on Telegram, where scammers are efficiently matched, for a fee, with “mules” willing to rent out their KYC’d bank accounts, again for a fee. Victims are instructed to wire funds to the mule, the mule forwards the money to a Bahamian bank, where it is converted into USDT on Binance, and the funds are ultimately cashed out through Cambodian casinos or payment firms like Huione. This is not chaos; it is workflow.
It is therefore unsurprising that “these days, scamming operations mimic professional institutions, employing thousands of people in marketing, sales and human resources departments.” Huione’s escrow services and laundering guarantees complete the picture, adding trust mechanisms to an ecosystem built entirely on deception, which is almost elegant in its cynicism. Even criminals, it turns out, demand counterparty risk management. Truly, there is no honor among thieves.
“Tether has frozen some of the group’s accounts at the behest of unspecified law enforcement officials and the messaging app Telegram has shut down some of its channels,” the Times writes. “But neither measure made a lasting effect.” The system adapts, the pipes reroute, and the fireworks continue, not as celebration, but as proof that this infrastructure is no longer marginal, temporary, or improvised, but embedded, resilient, and profitable by design.