“Chen Zhi was directly involved in managing the scam compounds and maintained records associated with each one, including records tracking profits from the scams that explicitly referenced ‘sha zhu,’ or pig-butchering,” the indictment claims, alleging there were also “ledgers of bribes to public officials.” One document allegedly held by Chen listed that two scam centers were equipped with 1,250 mobile phones that “controlled” 76,000 social media accounts. The indictment also claims that Chen held images demonstrating “Prince Group’s violent methods” against people who had been trafficked to the scam centers. The document includes images showing people bloodied and beaten.
The seizure of 127,271 bitcoins worth more than $15 billion at the time they were confiscated represents by far the biggest monetary seizure in the US Justice Department’s history—not just of cryptocurrency, but of money of any kind. That US 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 pleaded guilty to stealing them from the Bitfinex exchange, and prior to that with a billion-dollar seizure in 2020 of bitcoins allegedly stolen from the Silk Road dark web drug market by an unnamed hacker. Meanwhile, police in the UK seized 61,000 bitcoins worth $6.7 billion in June from a Chinese woman accused of an investment scam, an even bigger sum than those US records but less than half the sum taken from the Prince Group operation.
“It’s important to note that this seizure is extraordinary not only for its scale but for what it represents,” Ari Redbord, global head of policy at crypto-tracing firm TRM Labs, adding that the seizure is still a “small fraction” of the money generated by scam centers. “These are not isolated scams; they are factory-scale operations powered by forced labor, supercharged by the speed and scale of crypto, and connected through sophisticated money-laundering infrastructure that spans Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, China, and beyond,” Redbord says.
Redbord says the widespread action “strikes at the operational and financial core” of the widespread scam center ecosystem. In recent years, researchers tracking the scam compounds in Southeast Asia have seen them rapidly grow and use their illicitly gained money to invest in increasingly high-tech scam operations. Over the last two years, scam compounds have also been spotted emerging outside of Southeast Asia, with sites emerging 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 counter-threat finance campaign looks like—coordinated, data-driven, and global.”
