“Chen Zhi was directly involved in the management of the fraud rings and maintained records related to each of them, including records relating to fraud proceeds that clearly related to ‘sha zhu,’ or pig butchering,” the indictment alleges, alleging that there were also “books of bribes to public officials.” One of the documents allegedly in Chen’s possession said two fraud centers were equipped with 1,250 cellphones that “controlled” 76,000 social media accounts. The indictment also said Chen had photos showing the Prince Group’s “brutal methods” against people trafficked into fraud centers. The document contains photos of bloody and beaten people.
The seizure of 127,271 bitcoins, worth over $15 billion at the time of their confiscation, is by far the largest seizure of cash in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice – not just of cryptocurrency, but of any money. This U.S. law enforcement record was previously set in 2022 with the seizure of 95,000 bitcoins worth $3.6 billion from a Manhattan couple who later admitted to stealing them from the Bitfinex exchange, and previously with the 2020 seizure of $1 billion worth of bitcoins allegedly stolen from the gloomy drug market Silk Road by an anonymous hacker. Meanwhile, the police in Great Britain confiscated 61,000 bitcoins worth $6.7 billion in June from a Chinese woman accused of investment fraud, an amount even larger than American records but less than half the amount taken from Prince Group’s operations.
“It’s important to note that this seizure is remarkable not only for its scale, but also for what it represents,” Ari Redbord, global head of policy at cryptocurrency tracking firm TRM Labs, added that the seizure still represents a “small fraction” of the money generated by fraud centers. “These are not isolated frauds; they are factory-scale operations fueled by forced labor, supercharged by the speed and scale of cryptocurrencies, and connected through a sophisticated money laundering infrastructure that spans Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, China and beyond,” Redbord says.
Redbord says this sweeping action “strikes at the operational and financial core” of the widespread ecosystem of fraud centers. In recent years, researchers tracking fraud groups in Southeast Asia have observed their rapid expansion and utilize of illegally obtained money to invest in increasingly technologically advanced frauds. Over the past two years, fraud structures have also been detected outside Southeast Asia, with sites appearing in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America and West Africa.
“By targeting the financial architecture – the shell companies, banks, exchanges and real estate that move and hide these proceeds – the US and UK are dismantling the economic engine that sustains these crimes,” Redbord says. “This is what a 21st century threat finance campaign looks like – coordinated, data-driven and global.”