The Horsemen in the Room

Part II ended in Chongqing with a Chinese cybersec company, remote forensics, public-security customers and Hacking Team somehow wandering into the story.

Which already felt like enough bullshit for one messenger.

Then I went back to Horsemen Technologies SA and stopped looking at the company itself.

I started looking at the people sitting inside it.

And that was a mistake, lol.

His full name is Kang Yeow Cliff Teo. Singaporean.

He joined the board of Horsemen Technologies SA in May 2017 and stayed there until April 2020.

So basically right through Potato’s early years.

For a while, this looked completely boring. Some Singaporean businessman sitting on the board of a Swiss IP company. I mean yeah, so what?

Then I checked what else he was doing while he was there.

In December 2019, while still on Horsemen’s board, Cliff Teo became chairman and legal representative of a Taiwanese company called:

Taiwan Prince Real Estate Investment Co., Ltd.

And he wasn’t there representing some random personal investment.

He was representing:

Prince Group Holding Ltd.

Yep. That Prince Group.

For a few months, the same guy was sitting inside Potato’s Swiss publisher and inside a Prince Group company at the same time.

If the name means nothing to you, here’s the short version.

Prince Group is the Cambodian business empire built around Chen Zhi.

By 2025, U.S. authorities had gone after the network hard. Treasury designated Prince Group as a Transnational Criminal Organization, while U.S. prosecutors accused Chen Zhi and people around the group of running huge online-fraud operations tied to scam compounds in Cambodia.

The accusations include money laundering, forced labor, human trafficking and industrial-scale scam operations.

Basically the sort of stuff where "corporate conglomerate" starts sounding way too polite.

And Cliff Teo wasn’t appearing around this world ten years after Potato.

He was already there while he was still on Horsemen’s board.

That part is what makes the timing interesting.

At first I thought Taiwan Prince Real Estate might be some one-off corporate connection.

Then Meritwise Group Public showed up. It was set up in Mauritius in 2018.

And among the people associated with it were:

Cliff Teo, Dai An, Chen Sokly, Xiong Huajun.

Those names start showing up all over the later Prince Group reporting.

And again, look at the year:

2018.

Cliff was already on Horsemen’s board.

So now the timeline looks like this:

Switzerland, China, Singapore, Mauritius, Taiwan, Cambodia and now Malaysia.

Potato really rolls around the planet lol.

And because apparently this rabbit hole needed one more tab open, Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau currently lists:

TEO KANG YEOW CLIFF as a wanted fugitive.

Singapore national.

Wanted since 31 December 2024 over alleged business embezzlement and money laundering.

Teo says he backed away once things started looking wrong. Fair enough. The timeline is still the timeline.

Either way, the useful part for us is much simpler:

Cliff Teo doesn’t disappear after Horsemen. His corporate trail runs straight into Prince Group territory during the same years.

He has a very real corporate footprint outside Potato.

And that footprint runs straight into Prince Group territory during the exact same years.

At this point I was already satisfied with the Cambodia detour.

Then I found HaloChat which is also directly associated with Prince Group ecosystem.

In June 2026, U.S. Treasury sanctioned a UK company called:

HALO NETWORK TECHNOLOGY LTD also known as HaloChat.

And what does HaloChat do? Take a wild fucking guess.

They run another Telegram ripoff. A privacy messenger with E2EE and crypto wallet.

I genuinely laughed my ass off when I saw it.

Because after spending three articles following Potato through Switzerland, Chongqing, Malaysia, Mauritius, Taiwan and Cambodia, somehow another privacy + crypto messenger appears in the broader Prince-linked ecosystem.

I looked for a direct Tato/Potato and HaloChat technical connection and honestly didn’t find anything convincing enough.

Still, the coincidence is amusing.

Honestly, I’m past caring who gets the official trophy for "ultimate owner of TatoTalk."

That investigation can go on forever.

One company leads to another. One director pops up in three countries. One app gets renamed. Another privacy messenger appears somewhere in the same swamp.

What matters to me is simpler:

the "just trust the app, bro" version of this story falls apart way too fast.

Swiss publisher. Chongqing cert. Cybersec company. Remote forensics. Law enforcement contracts. Prince Group overlap. Malaysian rebrand.

That’s already enough for me to stop giving Tato the benefit of the doubt.

If your whole setup depends on one messenger staying honest, secure and private forever, your setup is fucking dogshit.

Think about it yourself: Do apps get sold? Do developers get compromised? Do companies lie?

All. The. Fucking. Time. Period.

All of this is normal and your OPSEC should survive it.

So, is TatoTalk a honeypot?

Maybe it is. Anyway, I’d still use it like it could become one tomorrow.

That mindset is worth a lot, a lot more than another thousand words of corporate detective work.

Still, let's assume it is and perform a 10-minute reality check.