Online, Then on the Run
Even before he fell afoul of Singapore authorities, Wang Dehai was a wanted man. In February 2018, Chinese authorities published an arrest warrant alleging he was involved in illegal gaming.
Along with Wang, two others arrested in Singapore in August had a background in online gaming. According to authorities, this was not a coincidence: A large amount of the funds laundered in Singapore, police said, was generated by online casinos and telecommunications scam factories.
Southeast Asia is in the midst of a lucrative cybercrime spree, much of it targeting Chinese citizens. China’s Ministry of Public Security has estimated illegal gambling by mainland Chinese amounts to 1 trillion yuan a year, or about $140 billion.
The scam and online casino industry in Cambodia alone has been estimated to be worth between $7.5 billion and $12.5 billion a year, Jeremy Douglas, head of Southeast Asia operations at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, told OCCRP.
Wang was at the forefront of the online gambling revolution in the region, working in the Philippines between 2012 and 2016, according to media accounts of court testimony he has given since his arrest. The industry was legal in the Philippines but, because the casinos targeted bettors in China where gambling is illegal, he was breaking Chinese laws.
Just a few months after Wang’s 2018 Chinese arrest warrant was publicized on police social media accounts, he and Su Binghai incorporated a company called Yuen Zheng Holding Limited, splitting ownership equally, Hong Kong corporate registry data shows.
That same year, Yuen Zheng took over 100 percent of the shares of New Future International Limited, the private equity firm which Su Binghai had founded a year earlier.
In 2019, New Future was again taken over by another company registered in the British Virgin Islands: “Yuan Zheng Holding Limited,” which is spelled exactly the same as the Hong Kong entity’s Chinese characters in standard pinyin transliteration. Because of the territory’s corporate secrecy rules, it was not possible to determine who owns Yuan Zheng. (Su Binghai and Wang Dehai’s Hong Kong-based company, Yuen Zheng, was dissolved in 2021.)
Despite the change of the ownership entity, the three Sus remain directors of New Future, according to a 2023 corporate filing in Hong Kong. Singapore corporate records also show Su Binghai and Su Fuxiang are the majority shareholders of New Future’s Singapore subsidiary. Su Binghai, meanwhile, features prominently on New Future’s corporate website, where he is pictured sitting at the center of a group of suited professionals.