Why Is Thailand Not Prosecuting Members of the Mauerberger Network?

One year after the South African national Benjamin Mauerberger and his network were first exposed, not one intermediary has been charged.

Benjamin Mauerberger, a South African national allegedly involved in financial networks connected to online scamming operations in Cambodia.

On their Whale Hunting blog in August 2025, Tom Wright and Bradley Hope began exposing the vast financial network built by the Cambodian businessman Yim Leak and the South African Benjamin Mauerberger, known in Bangkok as Ben Smith. In May 2026, the U.S. House Select Committee on China published a bipartisan report, “Crime, Corruption, and Power.” The report claims that a “South African fixer” is alleged to have operated between Cambodia’s crime hubs, developers linked to the Chinese Communist Party, and Thailand’s elite economy, laundering enormous illicit proceeds into Thai markets. All three footnotes cite Wright and Jacob Sim, a visiting fellow at Harvard University who specializes in Southeast Asia’s scam economy.

Thailand appears in that report twice. The first mention of the country is as a victim of the regional scam economy, with domestic losses put above 115 billion baht ($3.5 billion) a year, according to a 2025 estimate by Global Anti-Scam Alliance. The second is the market where many of the profits from Southeast Asian scam centers come to rest. By my own count, those proceeds sit in more than 20 listed and unlisted Thai companies, in holdings worth over 26 billion baht ($778 million). Thailand has become rather good at finding this money, but it has not begun to prosecute the people who helped to move and launder it.

The revelations have implicated a sitting member of the government. Vorapak Tanyawong, a former president of Krungthai Bank, was appointed deputy finance minister on September 19 of last year. He resigned 33 days later, after Whale Hunting reported that he had once been listed as an adviser to Cambodia’s BIC Bank, whose chairman is Yim Leak, and alleged that his wife had received $3 million in cryptocurrency from a Chinese-Cambodian criminal network. Vorapak, who has not been charged with any offence, has denied all of it. He said he had met Yim Leak but never advised or worked for BIC, called the reporting a smear campaign, and announced he would sue for defamation.

I should disclose where I stand. I am a former investment banker who has spent the past year documenting this network’s footprint in Thai capital markets on my blog, fringer.co. Vorapak is the plaintiff in the criminal defamation suit I am currently defending. I have also received cease-and-desist letters from Chartered Group, Capital Asia Investments, and others connected to them. And I now advise the parliamentary committee trying to extract answers from the regulators.

So here is my scorecard for the Thai agencies involved, ranked from best to most disappointing.

The Anti-Money Laundering Office deserves praise. Two orders, in December 2025 and April 2026, provisionally froze 102 items worth roughly 20.4 billion baht ($610 million). This included shares in listed companies including Bangchak Corporation and Finansia X, securities accounts, cars, loan claims, and a yacht. These are temporary seizures, not forfeitures, and the parties can petition the court to get the assets back. By Thai standards, it is still remarkable work.

The Department of Business Development has moved against illegal nominees, and the Central Investigation Bureau has broken up scam compounds and traced laundering routes through Cambodia-based Huione Pay. Huione Pay’s parent company Huione Group was severed from the U.S. financial system in October 2025 due to its alleged role as a “critical node” for laundering proceeds from transnational crimes and scams. In February 2026, the bureau obtained arrest warrants for Mauerberger and his Thai wife, Cattaliya Beevor.

These warrants deserve a closer read,........

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