A pair of China-born scammers convicted of bribing officials via a fake United Nations agency have had their Marshall Islands passports revoked while outside the country, potentially leaving them stranded in permanent limbo abroad.
Cary Yan and Gina Zhou spent over a week stuck in the transit area of Manila’s international airport earlier this month after authorities in Palau — and then in the Philippines — refused them entry.
Attorney General Bernard Adiniwin told OCCRP partner the Marshall Islands Journal last Wednesday that he had decided to strip the pair of their passports while they were outside the country, but did not explain what he had based his decision on. Although originally from China, Yan and Zhou were naturalized citizens of the Pacific island country, which is closely aligned with the United States.
“Without passports, like everyone else, they will be denied entry at our borders,” Adiniwin said.
The pair had left the Marshall Islands at the start of the month, claiming that they intended to transit through Palau and on to Hong Kong to seek medical treatment for Yan for a heart condition. Palau initially refused them entry, and put them on the next flight to the Philippines’ capital, where they were again blocked from entry.
After a week stranded in Manila airport they were eventually allowed to travel onward to Malaysia where Yan underwent surgery last week, Zhou told OCCRP by phone.
She said that she and Yan had not been notified of the Marshall Islands’ government decision to cancel their passports. They said they had already renounced their previous Chinese citizenship, meaning they now did not possess valid travel documents from any country. She said she did not know where they would go next.
“We never received any notice or anything,” Zhou said. “We don’t have other passports.”
Yan, said: “This is political persecution. It’s the same thing [the Marshall Islands government] have been doing for a long time.”
Yan and Zhou were arrested and extradited to the U.S in 2022 over a scheme to bribe Marshall Islands politicians to support the creation of a controversial special economic zone in a region of the country left uninhabitable by 1950s nuclear testing.
The scheme was strongly opposed by many in the country, including its former president, over fears it could undermine the security of the country and provide a strategic foothold for Beijing, which the country does not diplomatically recognise.
Yan and Zhou were deported to the Marshall Islands in 2023 and 2024 after serving short sentences in U.S prison over the bribery scheme.
A 2023 OCCRP investigation revealed that the scheme was just one chapter of a much larger grifting odyssey, which saw the pair scam victims with a miracle water cure, and then pay over a million dollars to United Nations diplomats in order to gain access to the global body and set up a fake UN agency.
The bogus agency was then used to funnel bribes to Marshallese politicians to support their special economic zone plan.
