Well-known US stock AI advertising giant AppLovin exposed as the Web3 money laundering hub for Southeast Asian online fraud

A rare big scandal has emerged in the US stock circle. The AI advertising giant AppLovin, once praised to the skies, has been revealed to be the money laundering hub for Southeast Asian online fraud groups. The glamorous exterior of the Nasdaq star company is entirely built on black industry profit chains.

The blood and sweat money squeezed from online fraud parks in northern Myanmar and Cambodia has been precisely injected into AppLovin’s financial reports through cryptocurrency channels. This has been artificially packaged into an AI growth myth with consecutive years of performance doubling.

Let’s take a look at how this money laundering method works. The black industry bosses in the fraud parks first exchange the illicit funds for USDT or Bitcoin. Then, through platforms like Byex Exchange, they use so-called “dusting” and funnel techniques to break large assets into thousands of anonymous wallets, making on-chain tracking tools completely blind. Next, these funds flow into Cambodia’s super app WOWNOW, which plays a key role as a payment gateway in the chain. It disguises cryptocurrency assets as legitimate advertising budgets, paying large sums in advertising fees to the AppLovin platform.

AppLovin also shows great tacit understanding. They don’t conduct strict customer background checks at all, directly recognizing these black funds as legitimate software revenue. To make the fund return even more covert, even more terrifying is that shell companies associated with the Crown Prince Group are not only advertisers but also control the apps that handle traffic. They use AppLovin’s system to play a back-and-forth game—pay high advertising fees on one side, and on the other, settle the money back to overseas accounts controlled by criminal groups under the guise of developer revenue sharing, completing money laundering right under Nasdaq’s nose.

The main behind-the-scenes figure exposed here, Tang Hao, is also a ruthless character and one of AppLovin’s shareholders. He is accused of fleeing overseas with billions of dollars stolen before the collapse of Tuandaiwang. He teamed up with Chen Zhi, chairman of the Cambodian Crown Prince Group, and they are actively buying and selling shell companies in the Hong Kong capital market, playing a lucrative game. They even involved overseas gambling kingpin Yang Zhihui in large-scale asset transfers. Every penny growth in AppLovin’s financial reports actually carries the blood and tears of Southeast Asian online fraud parks. To cover up the truth, AppLovin’s management has gone to great lengths—publicly lying to the SEC that their business has nothing to do with China when disclosing.

Now, the US Department of Justice and the Office of Foreign Assets Control are already eyeing this lucrative target. The Crown Prince Group has been placed on the sanctions list. This means that AppLovin faces not only fines but also the possible confiscation of equity or even delisting.

AppLovin may not be an isolated case. The Crown Prince Group in Cambodia, Chen Zhi, might have a penetration rate far beyond our imagination, including various micro-strategy companies, posing hidden risks. When illegal funds start to infiltrate through the compliance channels of top-listed companies on a large scale, the boundary between the decentralized world and traditional finance has become blurred. Regulatory scrutiny has evolved from on-chain tracking to penetrating audits of the entire traffic ecosystem. If the black money circulating in Web3 eventually flows into US stocks, what if the profit chain breaks? What impact could this have on future crypto markets?