Cambodia Revokes Zhong Huawei Casino License as Sihanoukville Crackdown Hits Eight Operators

Cambodia's casino sector enforcement campaign hit a new milestone on April 30, 2026, when the Commercial Gambling Management Commission revoked the license of Casino Zhong Huawei Golden Sand International Entertainment in Sihanoukville. The revocation came three weeks after a joint operation at the property detained 104 foreign nationals and seized nearly 1,600 mobile phones, computers, and network devices.

The Zhong Huawei license is the eighth casino authorization the CGMC has stripped since April. Together, the revocations describe a regulatory posture in Cambodia that has shifted materially from the implicit-tolerance baseline that defined the country's gaming sector in the immediate post-POGO years of 2024 and 2025.

What the Zhong Huawei raid found

The joint operation at Casino Zhong Huawei Golden Sand International Entertainment took place in early April 2026 and was conducted by the CGMC's General Secretariat together with Cambodian law enforcement. The 104 foreign nationals detained on the property are believed by Cambodian authorities to have been engaged in online scam operations rather than in lawful casino employment.

The seizure of nearly 1,600 mobile phones, computers, and network devices is itself a meaningful signal of the operation's scale. A working casino floor does not generate that device inventory. What the inventory does describe is an online scam compound — rows of operators each running multiple devices to maintain conversations with multiple victim targets simultaneously, the operational profile that has become familiar from the Chen Zhi-network investigations and from the Amnesty International documentation of human-rights abuses at compounds across the country.

Following its investigation, the CGMC concluded that the casino had been "involved in online scam activities" and moved to revoke the license granted to Zhong Huawei (Cambodia) Entertainment Co Ltd. The revocation decision was formalized in a CGMC document dated April 30, 2026.

The broader enforcement campaign

Zhong Huawei is the eighth casino license revoked by the CGMC since April. Other named casinos in the recent enforcement wave include Jin Yu Man Tang Casino, Xin Hao Peak Casino, and Eagle King Casino. The full list spans operators in Sihanoukville and in other historically scam-compound-heavy locations including Bavet and Kandal Province.

The enforcement wave sits on a foundation laid in February 2026, when the CGMC permanently revoked the licenses of five casinos — Golden Fortune Resorts World, Jinbei Group, Cambodian Heng Xin Real Estate, GC Casino, and Jinbei 4 Casino — over links to the Chen Zhi-led Prince Group transnational criminal organization. The February revocations followed the U.S. Treasury's October 2025 OFAC designation of the Prince Group and subsequent law-enforcement coordination across multiple jurisdictions.

The April 23, 2026 OFAC designation of Cambodian senator Kok An and 28 associated individuals and entities added a second high-profile sanctions overlay onto a Cambodian casino industry already navigating Chen Zhi-network fallout. Kok An's holdings, including the Crown Resorts properties and the Anco Brothers Co Ltd security business, were identified by Treasury as integral infrastructure for scam compounds operating across the country.

What changed in Cambodia's enforcement posture

For most of the 2024-to-2025 window when displaced POGO operators were relocating from the Philippines to Cambodia, the CGMC's enforcement profile against the established Sihanoukville and Bavet casinos was relatively quiet. License revocations were uncommon; the framework of the 2020 Cambodian gaming law allowed substantial operator autonomy in how floors and offices were used; and the political economy around the largest casino operators — some with senator-level political connections — created a substantial barrier to enforcement action.

That posture has changed in 2026 for several reinforcing reasons. The Chen Zhi arrest on January 6 and subsequent extradition to China removed the single most central figure in the post-POGO scam-compound architecture. The U.S. and U.K. coordinated sanctions actions of October 2025 and April 2026 raised the international reputational cost of inaction. The Amnesty International report documenting human-rights abuses at twelve identified casino-linked locations added a separate ethical and diplomatic dimension. And the Cambodian government, under Prime Minister Hun Manet, has begun to publicly signal a transformation strategy for Sihanoukville that requires the scam-compound footprint to be visibly reduced.

The implications for relocated operators

For the displaced PAGCOR-era POGO operators that relocated to Cambodia between 2024 and 2025 and that hold legitimate tier-3 online-international licenses under the country's three-tier gaming framework, the CGMC enforcement campaign is double-edged. On one side, the campaign is cleaning out the worst-offending operators that have given the entire Cambodian gaming sector its scam-compound reputation in international media; this is, over time, regulatorily and reputationally positive.

On the other side, the campaign creates a tightened compliance environment, where licensed operators have to be visibly and demonstrably distinct from the operators losing licenses. Premises that share buildings or compounds with revoked-license operators face elevated due-diligence scrutiny. Banking and payment-rail relationships that touch any Cambodian casino sector counterparty now carry a meaningful sanctions-and-AML overlay. And the political signal from the CGMC's willingness to revoke licenses at this cadence is that the previous era of regulatory predictability is over.

The Philippine angle

For Philippine readers and for the PAGCOR-licensed operators that watch the Cambodian regulatory environment closely, the Zhong Huawei revocation reinforces a pattern that PH Gaming Intel has been tracking through 2026. Cambodia remains the dominant destination for displaced POGO operators, but the country's regulatory tolerance has narrowed and the counterparty risk attached to the broader Cambodian casino sector has widened.

Operators considering Cambodia as a future regulatory home need to factor the post-Chen-Zhi and post-Kok-An sanctions environment into their site-selection and counterparty-selection decisions. The Cambodian tier-3 license is no longer the cleanly attractive alternative-to-PAGCOR option that it appeared to be at the start of 2025. The same regulatory architecture remains, but it now operates with substantially heavier enforcement weight and an externally observed reputational profile that imposes its own ongoing cost.

The bottom line

The Zhong Huawei revocation is one license action among eight in two months. The cumulative signal is the headline, not any single revocation. Cambodia's casino regulator is moving from an implicit-tolerance baseline toward an active-enforcement posture, and the speed of that transition matters more than the details of any individual case. For displaced POGO operators, for Philippine industry observers, and for the broader Southeast Asian gaming policy conversation, April 2026 will likely be remembered as the month the assumption changed.