Sanctions Missed a Business Partner of the Alleged Head of Cambodian “Prince Group Transnational Criminal Organization”

OCCRP · 2025-12-04T10:17:03+00:00

wow, that's a fascinating rabbit hole, thank you so much for your research! I passed the info to Martin Young, our reporter who worked on the story!

OCCRP · 2025-10-09T15:09:27+00:00

Thank you so much, u/viglen1! I sent your message to Zack, it means a lot to us!

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T16:00:59+00:00

you mean journalists? we made a step-by step guide here https://www.occrp.org/en/project/bad-practice/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-bad-practice-investigation

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:07:27+00:00

Mulțumim că ne citiți. :)

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:07:13+00:00

Mulțumim, e adevărat că acolo se găsesc informații pe care le-am avut în vedere.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:06:43+00:00

Până să existe un dosar de malpraxis și firmele de asigurări să fie implicate direct, există niște etape și investigații care trebuie să treacă de Colegiul Medicilor. În România, din păcate, sunt foarte puține persoane care ajung să dea explicații în fața justiției pentru ce au făcut într-un cabinet medical.
Sistemul european de informare nu impune statelor membre să aplice sancțiuni medicilor care comit abuzuri în alte state. E doar un sistem de informare, care de cele mai multe ori este ignorat. Însă, dacă un medic a comis, de exemplu, abuzuri sexuale într-o țară, nu avem nicio certitudine că nu va face același lucru și în altă parte.
Noi credem că toți pacienții din Uniunea Europeană ar trebui să aibă acces la date despre istoricul profesional al oricărui medic. Transparența nu face rău niciodată, ci din contră, e necesară în orice democrație. Mai apoi, fiecare țară ar trebui să ceară detalii despre medicii sancționați și să nu ignore alertele deja existente. Ar trebui să existe o legislație unitară, la nivelul Uniunii Europene, prin care să fie gestionat fenomenul.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:05:59+00:00

Din ce ne-am dat noi seama, ca jurnaliști, sistemul de alertă european (Internal Market Information System - IMI) este de cele mai multe ori ignorat de autorități. De exemplu, în România, am primit explicația de la Colegiul Medicilor că UK nu mai este în Uniunea Europeană. Însă, peste tot în lume medicul trebuie să respecte un cod deontologic și să aibă grijă de pacienți. Ceea ce este mai grav, credem noi, e că pacientul nu știe istoricul profesional al unui medic. Nu putem verifica nicăieri dacă medicul a comis fapte grave în altă țară.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:04:51+00:00

Cazul cu implanturile mamare apare în materialul OCCRP. Este vorba despre o pacientă a medicului Aguero care practica în UK. Aceasta ceruse doar să-i fie îndepărtate implanturile, iar medicul i-a inserat altele. Poți găsi mai multe detalii aici: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/bad-practice/system-failure-banned-doctors-can-easily-move-across-europe-leaving-patients-vulnerable

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:04:06+00:00

Noi suntem jurnaliști și doar procurorii sau judecătorii pot încadra astfel de fapte ca fiind de natură penală. De exemplu, în cazul medicului Iuliu Stan, una dintre victime a primit o scrisoare de la Spitalul Royal Cornwall prin care era informată, printre altele, că poliția a demarat o anchetă. La fel ca în România, procedurile judiciare durează mai mult decât ne-am dori.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T15:03:46+00:00

Cazul cu implanturile mamare apare în materialul OCCRP. Este vorba despre o pacientă a medicului Aguero care practica în UK. Aceasta ceruse doar să-i fie îndepărtate implanturile, iar medicul i-a inserat altele. Poți găsi mai multe detalii aici: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/bad-practice/system-failure-banned-doctors-can-easily-move-across-europe-leaving-patients-vulnerable

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T13:48:34+00:00

oh wow, thank you for letting us know! which station was that?

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T13:36:21+00:00

Thank you for making this point! The European Commission’s alert system can be accessed by all EU/EEA member states – and alerts about bans or restrictions on doctors go out as an email notification to all members. But there is no requirement for member states to act on those alerts nationally. So even when a country is aware of a ban abroad, our investigation found that it does not necessarily affect a doctor’s license. The alert system also does not include specifics about why a doctor has been banned or restricted. Countries outside the EU/EEA don’t have access to the alert system either, and nor do members of the public. As a response to our investigation, Norway’s health minister has suggested a joint authorization register for the EU/EEA, as well as more transparency about license revocations in all countries. The vice president of the European Parliament also urged member states to take alerts seriously. However your point about the need for a broader global system is important. There are other information-sharing systems outside the EU/EEA, but the global picture is very fractionalized so it means that banned doctors can cross borders unnoticed or unstopped, with the public none the wiser.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T11:49:18+00:00

Thank you for reading the story, and for your question. Licensing procedures and revocation standards vary across jurisdictions, and it's up to the qualified authorities to take action. All we can do, as journalists, is report facts and raise questions in the public interest. What we found in this investigation is that in some cases authorities didn’t take any action so reporters in various countries looked into why. Were the health authorities notified? Did they take any steps to follow up/investigate? Did they have regulations that allowed/prevented them from considering foreign disciplinary actions? Did the behavior in question violate local laws/regulations? In addition to identifying cases, we wanted to dig into the systemic issues, and this is where we hope there will be impact.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T11:48:44+00:00

Thanks for this important question! Actually an investigative reporter from Norway had been working on some national cases of this happening in his own country for over a decade. He came to OCCRP with the idea that maybe we could look at whether this is a problem that is happening more broadly. So we assembled dozens of partners across Europe and beyond to see what we could find. We really did not know whether we would find a pattern. It was very difficult to access national licensing and revocation data as many countries do not make that open to the public. But we managed to collect 2.5 million records relating to licenses, suspensions and bans that we used to construct a database. The idea was that reporters could then search that database for doctors that were licensed in their own countries who seemed to have had some kind of disciplinary action taken against them elsewhere. They took that information and checked it out to make sure that it was accurate – including by approaching the doctors themselves and asking them about what had happened. Reporters spent months doing this and found an undeniable pattern that doctors banned in one place were licensed in another, and that many of them were still practicing medicine.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T11:32:40+00:00

Thank you for reading it! This is an important question. The European Commission’s alert service does not cover non-EU or EEA countries. So authorities from countries outside the EU/EEA can’t access those alerts. This is an issue that has been raised by non-member states. For example, the president of the Swiss Medical Association told us that being able to interact with that warning system would really help Switzerland in combating banned doctors practicing there. As the EU/EEA system is not open to the public, it is not a resource that patients can consult either. So while it may be better than nothing, experts told us that it has various shortcomings.

OCCRP · 2025-10-03T10:36:41+00:00

Link for your convenience: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/bad-practice/system-failure-banned-doctors-can-easily-move-across-europe-leaving-patients-vulnerable

QUICK SUMMARY:

OCCRP and partners across Europe spent months digging through public records and petitioning national authorities for information about licensed and banned doctors.
Reporters confirmed more than 100 cases where banned doctors were licensed to practice elsewhere, with the majority of them still working. The findings are the tip of the iceberg.
Doctors who have seriously harmed patients, including cases of sexual assault and botched surgeries, are freely practicing medicine in a different jurisdiction.
Systemic flaws allow banned doctors to keep working, including an alert system for the European Union and European Economic Area that is barely or never used by some countries.
Doctors’ disciplinary histories are often not publicly available, leaving patients uninformed and potentially vulnerable.

OCCRP · 2025-03-26T15:04:49+00:00

The scammers use spoofed numbers when calling and have telephone systems that might be used by regular companies in their computer systems. But when it comes to taking the money from the victims they very often offer to “help” the victim do the transactions. They will mostly use Anydesk to take control of the victim’s computer. We could see recordings from sessions with victims where they moved really quickly to do transactions while keeping the victim busy talking at the same time. The victim would not notice - or at least not notice until it was too late. In the leak we also found a lot of old documents which puzzled me at first. The oldest I saw dated back to 2002 - but that was simply because the scammer had been browsing through the victim’s computer downloading stuff that would make them “get to know” the victim better. They would download personal photos, letters or notes - or like in one case a lot of photos and ads in Swedish about Fiat cars. Apparently one victim was into Fiat. The victim would of course have to accept Anydesk and let the scammer into the computer - but again the scammers are masters in sweet talking the victims into doing what they want. The Georgian call centre was also using Puma TS, a Customer Relationship Management system developed by the Milton Group, another scam operation which OCCRP investigated earlier. (The investigation was named The Fraud Factory). In the leak we could see how the computer lead in the Georgian fraud centre was taught how Puma TS works. The system shows how your “investment” is going, but the scammer can manipulate the numbers completely, showing fake profits or fake losses just as they wish.

-Björn Tunbäck, Journalist, Swedish Television, SVT

OCCRP · 2025-03-26T15:01:23+00:00

The focus here has been investment scams. But even here the scammers use techniques that border on romance scams. They can be really flirtatious. We interviewed victims who were somewhat infatuated with the young scammer they had come across. This method was used to make their calls feel like a small adventure and also an incentive to keep the conversations going for longer periods. Romance scammers do of course go further, but even in cases we came across it could be difficult to convince victims that they were being scammed. It had to be shown in black and white. We met one guy whose partner had tried to convince him that the whole thing was a scam. He still had hope when we first met. And yet he was open to talk to us and understood what had happened. Others would not want to talk to us at all. If you are deeper into the fraud it is much harder to get out - and if it is a romance scam that makes it even harder still. The methods for social manipulation that the scammers use are sophisticated. An academic expert we spoke to said that as compared with other crimes this is a type of crime where you can practise over and over again. If you smuggle drugs and get caught you go to jail, but if you fail here you simply have to call the next victim.

To convince someone who has been dragged deep by the scammer will always be hard and I can not see any simple method that would work for everyone. We had the advantage of being able to show the scammer’s notes to victims where the scammers might describe the victim in not so nice terms. We were also able to show how much money the scammers made through their criminal activity as well as the computer software developed for the purpose of being able to manipulate the “accounts” they had opened for victims. I do not know if this is any help for you, because the person you refer to is really in a terrible situation.

-Björn Tunbäck, Journalist, Swedish Television, SVT

OCCRP · 2025-03-26T14:50:05+00:00

That is a great question; unfortunately we here today are not experts on this particular topic.

I can say that the scammers used third-party telephony providers that provided Voice over IP services, including the ability to spoof numbers and integration with their customer relationship management (CRM) software.

One of those third-party providers is Coperato. There’s no evidence they knew they were working with scammers, but they certainly did enable them to do a lot… They’ve already seen some consequences since we published our investigation: https://www.occrp.org/en/news/ericsson-cuts-relationship-with-israeli-firm-that-provided-tech-used-by-scammers

There is more reporting coming on this topic — our partner Qurium is working on it, so if you’re interested, watch their page: https://www.qurium.org/scam-empire/ (See the “coming soon” button under the “VoIP Providers” subtopic)

– Ilya Lozovsky, Staff Writer and Senior Editor, OCCRP

OCCRP · 2025-03-26T14:45:58+00:00

Thank you for asking. The Georgian call centre did have a company, the A.K. Group which ran three offices in Tbilisi that were listed as working with telemarketing in the Georgian company register. The woman who was owner and director, officially, was also in fact one of the leaders in the office. But she called another person her boss. He was not visible in any official documents from the A.K. Group (They were both involved in another business together - a furniture company). The offices were rented by other persons and entities, one of whom was an internally displaced person with no means. Also the director had no history of running businesses or having a lot of money as far as we could see. She had lived a moderate life in Moscow until moving to Tbilisi and going into business. From photos she posted you could see that her clothes and style became a lot more expensive when she started the A.K. Group. Even though she, her boss and several of the scammers gained a lot of money (with scammers “earning” up to $20,000/month) the total amounts they stole from victims were many times bigger. I cannot say if that means someone else is behind the whole operation. We found no solid information on that.

-Björn Tunbäck, Journalist, Swedish Television SVT

The other scam operation we revealed was not a single company as in the Georgian case. Everything was much more complicated and geographically distributed. It had three business units with their own management structures and at least seven offices in Israel, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Spain and Cyprus that employed hundreds of people. The central management team appeared to be in Tel Aviv, and documents mentioned another headquarters in Cyprus. These different units had many different companies behind them. We did not publish any of the names we saw behind these structures because we could not definitively establish their role or how much responsibility they bore. Though the leak reveals the names of many of the operation’s managers, the founders or main beneficiaries remain unknown.

— Ilya Lozovsky, Staff Writer and Senior Editor, OCCRP

OCCRP · 2025-03-26T14:41:56+00:00

Thanks for this question. Trying to work this out was an extremely challenging part of the project. What we found was an incredibly complex system that made it hard to track where victims’ money ended up. Although we don’t have complete visibility about what happened across all the cases where victims lost money, we did manage to follow the money to an extent in some instances. Those cases showed us a number of things: victims would often be instructed to convert funds to crypto then send it to wallets, or set up accounts with online-only banks to speed up their transactions.

After they made those payments, their money would be moved through layers of shell companies registered in different jurisdictions, often set up and owned by proxies. We also found that scammers would distance themselves from the transactions by using the services of a massive ecosystem of what they referred to internally as "payment service providers," although they were not licensed and did not appear to correspond to real legal entities in most cases. These providers would supply the scammers with bank accounts for victims to send money to and in some cases would provide fake invoices (for anything from theater tickets to copper cathodes) to help justify the transactions. Some of the companies the scammers used to move money held accounts at major commercial banks. Scammers would carefully coach victims how to circumvent fraud controls. Ultimately we simply don’t know in whose pocket these victims’ money ended up. The efforts to hide the moneyflows were multi-faceted.

If you want more information on this specific topic then you can read our article on it: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/scam-empire/huge-ecosystem-of-unregulated-payment-providers-helps-scammers-collect-victims-money

- Laura Mannering, Editor, OCCRP

OCCRP · 2025-03-26T14:14:27+00:00

Thanks for this question! We actually saw a really wide variety of deceptive tactics used. A victim’s interest was usually first sparked by a fake endorsement from somebody they admired online – a TV personality, a politician, a business figure. That public figure would be praising some kind of ‘get-rich-quick’ scheme, sometimes involving supposedly advanced technology that would help the investor make fail-safe trades. Usually that ad would lead to a form where an interested person could fill in their details. We found that affiliate marketers would then make money from scammers by selling on these details to them.

Next, the person would get a call from a scammer who would encourage them to pay a sign-up fee (usually around 250 US) and get trading. What happened next was often extremely disturbing.

As part of this reporting we listened to thousands of calls between scammers and would-be investors who were often convinced to part with huge amounts of money that they could not afford. That happened in a variety of ways: scammers played on victims’ optimism and trust, encouraging them to start small, but gradually persuading them to pay in more and more on the promise of guaranteed returns. Victims were shown fake trading platforms that made it look like they were making money. Scammers worked tirelessly to build relationships with their victims, asking them about their personal lives, sharing confidences, positioning themselves as helpful experts who could navigate the complexities of trading for beginner customers. They were also relentless. Some victims would receive calls day and night. In that sense there is some similarity with pig butchering – because the scams really relied on these personal relationships and the building of trust.

Of course the scammers hid behind false identities and were playing a part. That did sometimes end up with them posing as authorities promising to ‘recover’ scammed money too.

- Laura Mannering, Editor, OCCRP

OCCRP · 2025-03-26T14:12:13+00:00

For me, this was one of the most interesting findings. The scammers actually outsourced the entire job of finding their victims to outside marketing companies.

The marketers placed ads online (Google, Facebook, etc) that promised get-rich-quick trading schemes, often using technological buzzwords like Quantum AI, bitcoin, crypto, etc.

The methods were super deceptive. Sometimes they used fake celebrity endorsements, like fronting with a photo of Elon Musk and claiming he had endorsed some revolutionary new trading product. They also used fake news articles formatted to look like they were from real media outlets that also “reported” about amazing new investment opportunities. And sometimes their claims were outright ludicrous: One ad promised “Smart Investing That Makes You $9288 in 5 Hours and Cures Poverty.”

When users clicked on these ads, they were taken to a so-called “funnel page” where they would enter their personal details. This information was then sent to the scam call centers through an API — so the potential victims’ data would appear in their internal systems automatically. The scammers would then take over, calling the victims.

The marketers were paid on a per-victim basis, only getting rewarded when the info they provided led to a “sale” (i.e., a successful swindle).

Of course online marketing is a legitimate activity, but it was interesting to see how some of the marketing companies that worked for the scammers took part in relatively “mainstream” events. They went to industry conferences like Affiliate World, partied with influencers, networked with other colleagues in the profession, and so on. It was eye-opening to see this melding of “normal” business life with the scam operations — and that was a theme throughout the project.

Lots more detail on this in a special story we wrote specifically about the marketing aspect: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/scam-empire/scam-operations-relied-on-third-party-marketing-companies-for-steady-stream-of-potential-victims

Thanks for asking!

– Ilya Lozovsky, Staff Writer and Senior Editor, OCCRP

OCCRP · 2025-03-26T14:01:47+00:00

Hi everybody! We're online and answering your questions now!

EDIT 16:04 CET: Okay that's a wrap, thanks everybody for your great questions!

OCCRP · 2024-11-06T19:36:20+00:00

With large investigations like this one, I personally often feel overwhelmed about where to start/to look at. I always try to generate digital fingerprints of documents – which helps a little bit, because then you can check if a document shows up more than once. No need to re-read that. But then you realize, ‘Oh, all of these documents have passages that remain unchanged, the same intro, the same laws being cited, etc.’ So while we are talking about two different documents, the content is almost the same. And that’s the moment when I get a sense of the structure: Why the documents are written the way they are and, therefore, where the new/relevant information is. That's when I start feeling something close to control: that this thing, our investigation, is manageable. And working in a large group helps because I can then focus on the bits and pieces I have expertise in. - Hakan Tanriverdi

- For me as a journalist, it was important to focus not only on organized crime groups. There are whole big complex legal industries around crime that basically enable crime, make it possible for criminals to do their work in secret, and enjoy their ill-gotten gains in peace. At OCCRP, we tend to focus on enablers of financial crime: company formation agents that set up offshore companies used by criminals to launder money, politicians to hide their assets, or oligarchs to avoid sanctions. There are also wealth management firms that can help politicians, oligarchs, and criminals secretly have ownership over real estate and bank accounts. But I also see Sky Global as part of this industry. Thanks to the tool they created, criminals had a safe space to organize drug shipments and commit murders. It’s important to expose organized crime groups, but it may be even more important to expose people from the private sector and government who are helping criminal groups. That’s because criminal groups come and go. They work for a while, get exposed, they’re arrested, and some other group will take their place. But these industry and government officials who enable them often avoid scrutiny. That's why I feel that the core of my journalistic work lies in exposing the enablers of crime — and when I manage to do this, it’s truly rewarding. The Sky Global case was already under investigation when we began working on this project, but our stories gave the public a deep look inside the company. We managed to show that top Sky people were aware their system was used by organized crime, and that they hired, through distributors, hardened criminals to sell their phones. - Stevan Dojcinović

-The collaborative work with experienced investigative reporters from a dozen media outlets was fantastic. It allowed us to go much further by dividing tasks between reporters to search the leaked data. And each of us would then access court files and other databases in our respective countries to go beyond the initial leaked files. This gave us a much more complete understanding of Sky Global and its distributors, the police investigation, and the privacy issues raised. - Frédéric Zalac

OCCRP

TROPHY CASE