The Fight of My Life

Escaping Scam City | BONUS | FIGHTING BACK

• Cadence Productions • Season 2 • Episode 9

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There have been some incredible developments these last two months in the fight against forced scamming. For the first time, the world’s most powerful governments are beginning to treat this crisis not as a distant crime, but as a global human rights emergency — one that can be fought with the same tools once used against war criminals and oligarchs. At the centre of that strategy is a man named Bill Browder.

From Washington to Phnom Penh, this episode follows how the same weapon Browder helped create is being turned on the crime bosses and corrupt officials profiting from human trafficking and forced scamming in Cambodia.

SPEAKER_01:

One of the main questions I've been asked since the release of Escaping Scam City is this. Is there anything that our governments can do to stop these guys? These criminal kingpins profiting off the misery of so many. I get it. There's a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching gross injustice unfold somewhere you can't reach. When you can see it happening. The trafficking, the torture, the scams, but it's happening in another country. And it's even more maddening when that injustice isn't just hurting their people, it's reaching back across borders, stealing from yours too. And then there's the final gut punch, when the country itself, the one where this is all happening, isn't just turning a blind eye. It's cashing in. In places with police forces, ministries, and courts that should be shutting them down. And yet, nothing. Or worse, denials. Sweeping, aggressive insult your intelligence denials. You remember how our series producer Jake published his paper in May? The one called Policies and Patterns: State-abetted Transnational Crime in Cambodia as a global security threat. Well, hot on its heels, the Cambodian government came out swinging. In a three-page press release, the Ministry of Interior accused the report of being, quote, exaggerated, unprofessional, and unsubstantiated. It claimed that Jake and his team had, quote, fabricated facts and slandered senior government officials, describing his findings as, again, quote, based on hallucinations and imagination. In short, they said, you've got it all wrong. There's nothing to see here. It's next level gaslighting. So then, what are you meant to do? What can the so-called victim countries, the ones having their money stolen, countries like the US, actually do? Well, the good news is there are a few levers that can be pulled to fight back. If the appetite is there. And the even better news is that in the past month or so, they've started to be pulled. And what's happened is a very big deal.

SPEAKER_04:

Yes, it's enormously significant.

SPEAKER_01:

Jake's gonna help us unpack some of the exciting things that have happened. But first, to understand what some of those levers are, and actually how they came to be, we need to step away from Cambodia for a moment. We actually need to look at what happened in Russia back in November of 2008. That was the month a Russian tax lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky was thrown into a Moscow prison, charged with tax evasion. A year later, he was dead. At the time, Russian authorities said he died of heart failure, natural causes. In other words, nothing to see here. But the truth, as multiple investigations would later prove, was far darker. Sergei Megnitsky had been tortured for 358 days. And on November the 16th, in 2009, he was beaten badly by eight riot guards with the rubber batons. He was denied medical care and he died alone in his cell. Seems pretty extreme for tax evasion, doesn't it? Well, the real reason Sergei was in that cell was because he uncovered one of the largest tax frauds in Russian history. You see, Sergei had been working for an American investor who ran Hermitage Capital Management, the biggest foreign investment fund in Russia at the time. In 2007, Russian officials raided the offices of Hermitage. And soon after, those same officials that did the raid used C's documents from the raid to orchestrate a$230 million tax scam, basically stealing public money from the Russian treasury. Sergei discovered the fraud and traced it back to the senior officials and then testified against them. A few months later, those same men had him arrested. Sergei's client, the American investor, wasn't in the country at the time of Sergei's death. He'd already been banned from entering Russia, declared a quote, threat to national security. But it devastated him. And it completely changed the course of his life. That client's name is Bill Browder.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so my name is Bill Browder. I'm the head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign. And for the last 15 years, I've been working on holding Vladimir Putin and his uh regime accountable for human rights abuse. It all stemmed from the murder of my lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. He was 37 years old. He left a wife and two children. Since his murder, um, it's become my full-time life mission to go after the people who killed him to make sure they face justice. And in doing so, the um the one type of justice that we could successfully get was a piece of legislation called the Magnitsky Act, named after Sergei Magnitsky, which imposes visa bans and asset freezes on the people who killed him and the people who commit other human rights abuses, similar human rights abuses.

SPEAKER_01:

The Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012. Up until this point, sanctions were, generally speaking, a blunt instrument. Governments punished other countries, not the people running them. If a regime was corrupt or violent, the whole nation paid the price. Trade cut off, banks frozen, ordinary people suffering, while the powerful, the ones actually responsible, usually found a way to keep getting richer. The Magnitsky Act changed that. It flipped the whole idea of sanctions on its head. Instead of punishing a country, it targeted the individuals, the ones who actually profit from corruption and abuse, and it targeted their entities. It was like turning a shotgun into a sniper rifle, and it gave the world a new way to go after those who'd always been untouchable. It lets governments freeze assets and ban visas for people involved in serious corruption or abuse, no matter where in the world it happened. It's one of the few tools that can actually make powerful people feel consequences for what they've done.

SPEAKER_02:

And the Magnitsky Act was first passed in the United States in 2012, signed by President Obama. It then went to Canada in 2017, the UK in 2018, the European Union in 2020, Australia in 2021, and various other countries in between. And there are now 35 countries around the world that have a Magnitsky Act. It doesn't just apply to Russians, it applies to perpetrators of human rights abuse everywhere. And it's um uh if if there ever was a something that could go viral um in the world of human rights, the Magnitsky Act is it. It provides a platform and a um legal mechanism for victims of human rights abuse to go after uh the perpetrators, and the perpetrators from most in most countries and most situations have enjoyed absolute impunity up until the Magnitsky Act uh became a uh form of legislation.

SPEAKER_01:

For much of this year, there's been a sense of disappointment, even anger, amongst those fighting forced scamming. The US, once seen as a driving global force for good, had started to retreat. USAID was dismantled, key funding streams were dried up, and America's role as a moral leader in the fight against this evil seemed to be fading. Which made what happened in September just so surprising. In the US, the Department of Treasury has a branch called the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC. It's OFAC that implements and enforces sanctions. In the human rights world, whenever OFAC sanctions are mentioned in a Treasury press release, people sit up and pay attention. And on September the 8th of this year, well, that's exactly what happened.

SPEAKER_00:

Today, the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, OFAC, implemented sanctions against a large network of scam centers across Southeast Asia that steal billions of dollars from Americans using forced labor and violence. The action includes 10 targets based in Cambodia.

SPEAKER_01:

As you can imagine, people rush to see who and what entities are on the list. We and our production team held our breath as we scrolled down the names. And to our great delight, there, halfway down the page, was KB Hotel Co Limited, aka Kaibo. Kaibo, of course, being the scamming compound Michael was sold to after leaving DV. It was designated by OFAC as a casino-turned criminal compound. In addition, its co-founder was also sanctioned. Unfortunately, there was no mention of DV Casino or Xinjiang Hotel, and there are many, many others that are not on the list. But by all accounts, this was still a very big step.

SPEAKER_04:

And you know, one of the things that we've talked about here and that I a lot of my work has focused on is that the need for accountability to be injected into these spaces where there just doesn't exist. And sanctions is the first and lowest hanging fruit way and opportunity to do that. And so the sanctions that came down, including against the compound where Micah was held, um, are really, really important.

SPEAKER_01:

And hang on, it gets even better. On September 18, just 10 days later, a new bill in the US was introduced. The Dismantle Foreign Scam Syndicates Act. It calls for a national strategy, dedicated funding, and critically sanctions on 43 transnational criminals driving Southeast Asia's online scam industry. Representative Shreve is the sponsor for the act.

SPEAKER_03:

To investigate Chinese Communist Party involvement, to support foreign law enforcement partners, to deploy offensive cybercapabilities, and finally to unite our allies against these transnational syndicates. This is not just consumer fraud, it's organized crime, it's counter to national security and human rights, all rolled into one. I urge support for this Mr. Chairman.

SPEAKER_01:

This was another huge win in the fight against this industry. It's the kind of unified, coordinated action people like Aaron West have been calling for since the beginning. With the sanctions, and now the introduction of this act, momentum was building. And then, the very next day, September the 19th, the US government released its 2025 Trafficking in Persons or TIP report. Now, a bit of context here. This report comes out every year, usually by the end of June, and it's become one of the most powerful tools for holding governments accountable. So, for this year, when June 30 came and went without its release, many in the anti-trafficking world started to worry that it had been shelved for good. Then finally, it came out. And when it did, there was a bombshell in sight. Cambodia was listed, because of these scamming compounds, as one of the world's 13 state sponsors of human trafficking. The report publicly accused the Cambodian government of complicity, saying officials weren't just ignoring the crimes, but in many cases were colluding with the perpetrators and profiting from the scam industry. We weren't to know it at the time, but this report was paving the way for the next quite astonishing move from the US. But before we get to that, let's just pause for a moment here. Because these are some pretty major victories. And none of them would exist without the brave storytellers who've risked so much to speak out. People like Micah and Ava, who've been inside. Like Mek Daro who spent years investigating the compounds. And Shy, who's walked, and is still walking, the long road to financial recovery. These are ordinary people doing something extraordinary. Standing up to tell the truth about what they've seen, what they've lived through. Truth telling is one of the most formidable weapons in the fight against injustice. And it's something that Bill Browder knows all too well. Because when he first set out to fight for justice, he didn't have political power or legal training or a network of activists behind him. All he had was a story.

SPEAKER_02:

I came to the world of human rights in a totally different way than almost everybody else comes to the world of human rights. I I can remember when I um was invited to testify at the human rights subcommittee at the House of Representatives. And I showed up there and I had no experience with any of this stuff. I came to the world of human rights as a hedge fund manager whose lawyer was murdered. I had no training in law, I had no training in politics, I had no training in human rights, and I was invited to this testimony, and um uh and there were six five other people, six of us in total, and nobody had told me what I was supposed to do. And I was the last witness, and with the ahead of me was Human Rights Watch, and then there was Reporters Without Borders, and then Amnesty International. And each one of these um organizations got up, uh read from a piece of paper, and then cited a bunch of um statistics about the terrible things that were happening in Russia at the time. And I was thinking to myself, oh my god, I didn't prepare a piece of paper, I don't have any statistics. I I what you know, how foolish could I have been to not like uh, you know, ask people what I was supposed to do. And all I had was a story. And so I I stood up and I told the story of Sergei Magnitsky. And I told the story of how uh who he was and how he was this idealist, man of principle, and how he discovered a major crime, and how instead of honoring him for uh uh being a good patriot, they punished him with the worst type of punishment you could ever give a person, which is slow torture and then murder. And I didn't um read from a piece of paper. I looked into the eyes of the members of the committee, and at the end of my testimony, Congressman McGovern, who um who is the chairman of the committee, said, you know, we we sit here and we hear so many people spout off statistics, but this is a human story. And um uh and I'm gonna do something about it. It's very hard for anybody who um hears a story like that to do nothing.

SPEAKER_01:

It's very hard for anybody who hears a story like that to do nothing. I like to think that's exactly what's happening now inside the halls of power in Washington. Because the United States is no longer just watching. They're striking hard. And on October 14, they dealt their biggest blow yet. This time, in partnership with the UK government. They sanctioned a 37-year-old Chinese-born Cambodian and British national named Chunjet, along with his empire, Prince Holding Group. Together, they seized around wait for it,$15 billion in Bitcoin. Just to put that into perspective, this was the largest criminal asset seizure in human history. A lot of Chun's assets were frozen too, and the US Justice Department filed charges accusing him of running forced labor scam compounds across Cambodia.

SPEAKER_04:

It's truly historic. So, one of the most powerful people, one of the most senior officials in the Cambodian government, who is someone who actually purchased Cambodian citizenship, doesn't actually come from Cambodia, but has risen to power in Cambodia on the back of his ability to generate money for the elites because of his skill and ruthlessness in executing this form of crime, was not only sanctioned by the US and the UK, and then the US government actually took$15 billion in cryptocurrency assets from him because of what he is doing in this situation. Like we've never, as uh as a as a as a people, uh had a government who took this much exploitative predatory profit from a criminal actor.

SPEAKER_01:

One look through Chun's frozen assets, even beyond the crypto that was seized, gives us a glimpse into his empire. 12 million pound mansion on Avenue Road in North London, a 100 million pound office building in the City of London, 17 flats on New Oxford Street, yachts and private jets, and high-value artwork, including a Picasso painting. It's sobering to hear about these frozen assets and then think back to people like Shai, who lost his life savings to enrich people like Chin. But now to see this once untouchable empire cut off at the knees signals something of a power shift.

SPEAKER_04:

And it's a sign that the voices of the most vulnerable and people with proximity to seats of power are starting to align. And the really beautiful thing in there is that humans are now standing up for each other around the world with little else to connect them.

SPEAKER_01:

For Jake, this past month has been an incredibly rewarding time.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, I mean, there's a there's a bit of personal. I don't know, like I it it's personal. This has become personal for me. And and certainly there's something personally gratifying about seeing my work cited in a historic indictment. Uh, there's something personally gratifying about the things that I feel like have been yelling into the void, finally getting traction and having real policy impact.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a good reminder. Meaningful change doesn't come easily, doesn't come quickly.

SPEAKER_02:

But as Bill reminded us, you just keep on hammering away and hammering away. And what I've learned is that the people who don't want you to do this generally aren't as as um insistent, you know, that they're not the ones that you know, they're working nine to five and not working on the weekend. And I'm sure you're you know working around the clock and working every weekend. And so, you know, you you probably care more about get you know doing the doing the right thing, you know, creating consequences, ending impunity, than the person who um for whatever reason inside the apparatus doesn't want you to do this. And so, you know, you'll find your you know your openings um as long as you stick with it. And um sticking with it sometimes means you know sticking with it for a really long time.

SPEAKER_01:

For Jake and Aaron and Jason Tower and the growing number of others in this fight, this rings very true.

SPEAKER_04:

Like, what needs to happen now is for us to keep the pedal down. Um, one set of aggressive sanctions isn't going to do it. One designation on a bureaucratic report isn't gonna do it. Like, if if what we take away from this is like, ah, the scam kingpin is has fallen, and now where we can move on, we might as well not have done anything. Like, yes, this is important and we've crippled a bad actor, but there are an entire there is an entire demographic of people like Chinza around Southeast Asia and in Cambodia particular, that have purchased and secured unbelievable influence and are using that influence to protect criminal industries exactly like the ones that exploited Micah and Ava. And if we don't pay attention to those people, or if we somehow declare mission accomplished prematurely, we will have failed those people, and we'll have failed the people like the ones that you met during this podcast who are standing up on behalf of those at extreme personal risk. It's it's really time for the world to come around and say, first and foremost, sovereign states will not be run on the back of the scam economy. And then beyond that, the world also needs to continue pushing their governments, everyone around the world needs to be pushing their governments to take concerted actions to both play offense and defense. Because this is a form of crime that is going to continue exploiting trafficking victims and exploiting unsuspecting scam and financial crime victims from around the world until governments take a concerted and comprehensive approach to resolving it.

SPEAKER_02:

However, people can talk about them, they should. Because when things are made public, then the world can respond to them. We all are on social media and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. And um I think that the the most important thing that anyone could do if they if they see evil happening is is um expose evil in whatever format they can. Um because that's how um things change, is if people know about them and and um and are not too scared to um to put the information out there.

SPEAKER_01:

He's right. When evil thrives in silence, the simplest act of truth telling can become an act of defiance. And sometimes it's the spark that changes everything. So, before we wrap up, a quick update from us here at Cadence and Unheard. As we mentioned in our last episode, we've been working on a couple of new stories, still in the world of force scamming, but this time in a different region. Originally we planned to release them as bonus episodes in this series. But the deeper we dug, the more we realize that this isn't just an update. It's a whole new chapter, full of new countries and incredible new characters, each fighting their own version of this battle. And so that's what we're making now. Season three of the fight of my life. We'll be back soon. But for now, we're drawing a line under this season. Grateful, inspired, and more determined than ever. We'll leave you with words we've found deeply encouraging.

SPEAKER_04:

The world is starting to wake up and to act accordingly, and ultimately, this is a too rare reminder that truth, when spoken persistently enough, can still move power.

SPEAKER_01:

The fight of my life is brought to you by Cadence Productions in partnership with Unheard. This series, Escaping Scam City, was written by Carvio Visvanathan, Nikki Florence Thompson, and me, your host Rich Thompson. The series producers are Lydia Bowden, Jake Sims, Ben Field, Carrie Ann Tilson, Carvio Visfanathan, and Rich Thompson. Our theme song is See Me Fly by Rosa. Our incredible translator is Corinne Powell. Thank you so much, Corinne. Additional sound design by Brendan Ridley. Unheard's advocacy and support for this project was led by Lydia Bowden, Carrie Ann Tilson, and Laura Entwistle, with a massive thanks to their generous community of supporters and with a special shout out to Wen, Dane, and Val. And finally, we're thankful to you for choosing to come on this journey with us. We'll see you on the next episode.

Contributor

Rich Thompson

Host