An investigation into the abduction and murder of a Chinese cyber scam boss uncovers his shadow identities and how he was operating across borders without consequence.
A Chinese cyber scam boss who was kidnapped and murdered in Sri Lanka’s capital in July went by three separate aliases and carried at least two passports, according to documents obtained by OCCRP and The Sunday Times.
Chen Guoqing, 31, was abducted from the Colombo Port City special economic zone in the early hours of July 23 by a group of over a dozen men, one of them brandishing a pistol, according to a copy of the police investigative report into the incident. He was driven to a rural area over 70 kilometers east of Colombo, tortured to death, and his body was abandoned.
The murder of Chen — and the hunt for his killers — received extensive media coverage in Sri Lanka, amid fears that the South Asian country is becoming a new base for Asian criminal syndicates that target victims around the world with sophisticated online fraud schemes.
Sri Lankan police told OCCRP and the Sunday Times that they have arrested five Chinese nationals over the murder and are seeking another three suspects, who are believed to have fled the country. Local authorities have said they believed Chen was involved at a high level in international criminal activity and was murdered over a money dispute with other criminals.
Investigative files show police recovered two passports belonging to the murder victim, each using a different name. One, a Cambodian passport, identified him as Chen Hao. The other, from Suriname, identified him as Tao Guoqing.
Reporters were able to find the murder victim’s real name — Chen Guoqing — by crosschecking his Cambodian passport with a publicly available copy of naturalization and name change records from that country’s Gazette.
Chen’s real name is not mentioned in the Sri Lankan police investigative report, and neither his Cambodian nor his Surinamese aliases have been reported in local media.
Details of Chen’s identity come as OCCRP and the Sunday Times have revealed that, despite over a thousand well-publicized arrests, Sri Lanka has failed to successfully prosecute a single person for using the country as a base to conduct online scams targeting foreigners.
Brian Hanley, the Asia-Pacific Director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, said Chen’s murder highlights the vulnerability of Sri Lanka to infiltration by scam syndicates fleeing crackdowns in traditional Southeast Asian epicenters like Cambodia.
“There’s weak enforcement [by Sri Lankan authorities],” Hanley said. “Scams pay. Nobody gets caught. Or if they do, there’s no sanction.”
“For a country like Sri Lanka this level of scam activity could easily start to see a single digit contribution to their entire GDP.”
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