Hailing originally from Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Hsu Ming-chin is a convicted crystal meth manufacturer who caught a 20-year prison sentence back in 2014. Armed with fake IDs and a rotating collection of passports, he slipped out of the country and eventually landed in 2021 in Batumi, a Black Sea resort city in Georgia. There, he reinvented himself as Thomas Xu, the big boss of Cambodia’s Lixin Group. With high-profile signs plastered all over town, he promised to sink billions of Georgian lari into building the Caucasus region’s tallest landmark tower, while throwing cash at the local football team and disaster relief efforts. Locals sitting in the teahouses just shook their heads: money talks, and he knew how to dress the part.
Unlike the gun-toting warlords running scams up in northern Myanmar, Hsu played a more civilized game in Georgia, relying on cash and local political protection. Using shell companies as a front for real estate and tourism, he quietly turned his operations into scam call centers. City officials turned a blind eye, local police took bribes to tip him off, and local media outlets on his payroll sang his praises as a civic-minded philanthropist. If Georgia's former head of national security and former prosecutor general hadn't eventually been brought down and slapped with US sanctions, this crew would probably still be counting cash comfortably just a few hundred meters from the state security headquarters.
But when political winds shift, umbrellas fold fast—unlike northern Myanmar, there were no armed militias here to shoot it out. Once Georgia launched a serious anti-corruption crackdown and a string of officials went down, Hsu's web of fake investments and paid-off protection vanished into thin air. That much-hyped multi-billion tower turned out to be nothing more than a few digital renderings, popping the Thomas Xu investor bubble for good. Reading the news from Phnom Penh, people know how this goes: whether these cross-border syndicates hole up in Batumi or anywhere else, the day of reckoning always catches up to them in the end.
