$AppLovin(APP.US)Do you know about "ad money laundering"?
Traditional money laundering requires opening restaurants to falsify revenue, buying properties with cash transactions, or exchanging cash for chips at casinos. These methods have limited scale and are easily traceable. Digital advertising is completely different.
The global digital advertising market is worth $600 billion annually, with billions of transactions daily. An ad auction completes in milliseconds. A U.S. advertiser can pay a Southeast Asian publisher in one second—this would trigger countless alarms in traditional banking but is normal business in the ad industry.
You just need to set up a shell company, claim to be a "game developer," and then aggressively place ads on ad platforms. The platform receives the ad fees and shares a portion with "publishers." If you're also the publisher, the money flows back to your pocket. Now, this money has a perfect source: "ad revenue."
The entire process requires no physical presence, no real restaurants or properties. You just need a few computers, fake accounts, and an ad platform that doesn’t ask too many questions.
On January 19, a report accused AppLovin, with a $140 billion market cap, of being such a platform.
The report linked AppLovin to two criminal networks. One was China’s $36 billion P2P fraud case "Tuandai." The other is familiar to Taiwanese: the Prince Group.
Yes, that Prince Group—Chen Zhi, Cambodian scam compounds, pig-butchering scams, and "you can beat but not kill." In November 2025, Taipei prosecutors raided the Heping Dayuan mansion, seized $4.5 billion in assets, and listed nine Taiwanese companies on U.S. sanctions. Chen Zhi was arrested and extradited to China on January 7, 2026.
The report claimed AppLovin, Prince Group, and major shareholder Hao Tang built a "Möbius strip": criminal organizations placed ads via AppLovin’s algorithms, and the money was eventually "cleaned" into U.S. capital markets.
Despite several short-seller reports over two years, the stock still rose 108% in 2025.
AppLovin is an S&P 500 component. If you own an S&P 500 ETF, your retirement fund might include this company.
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