Short sellers continue to target adtech giant AppLovin.
CNBC reports that AppLovin has sent a cease and desist letter to short seller CapitalWatch after it made striking claims about the company’s links to a Cambodian business which has been deemed a criminal organisation by the US treasury.
AppLovin called the claims in the reports ‘defamatory and baseless’, says CNBC, which appears to have obtained the cease-and-desist letter. CapitalWatch’s 35 page report on AppLovin also contains “numerous absurd and demonstrably false statements”, says the adtech giant.
The short seller claims that AppLovin has been “transformed into an asset safe haven for cross-border black money”. It alleges that major AppLovin shareholder Hao Tang has close ties with Chen Zhi, chairman of Cambodian finance outfit Prince Group. The US Department of Justice charged Prince Group with wire fraud and money laundering in October, and has deemed the outfit a criminal organisation.
Prince Group-owned Prince Bank is also a payments partner of Cambodian ‘super app’ WowNow, which is also referenced in CapitalWatch’s claims.
“AppLovin does not work with the Prince Group, WowNow, or – to its knowledge or belief – any affiliates thereof,” the company said in its letter to CapitalWatch. “Of course, you fail to identify any evidence or support to suggest otherwise.”
These outlandish claims are the latest to be levelled at AppLovin after short sellers targeted the firm in early 2025. Two short-seller reports were published in February 2025 and claimed that AppLovin was engaged in “the systematic exploitation of app permissions”, ad fraud and shady data practices.
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi described the short sellers’ reports as “misleading” and “littered with inaccuracies and false assertions”.
A third report emerged around a month later March from Muddy Waters Research, which claimed that the adtech giant is “built on systematically violating third party platforms’ terms of service”. AppLovin denied the claims, and CEO Adam Foroughi published two blogs designed to reassure markets and explain its business practices further. AppLovin also hired lawyers to investigate the short-sellers’ activities.
It’s been an eventful year for the company – it also sold all 10 of its game studios to Tripledot for $800m and was briefly in the running to buy the new US-run spin-out of TikTok.
