The UK also placed financial sanctions on Chen, the Prince Group, and other linked entities.
Over the last decade, organized crime gangs operating out of Southeast Asia have operated dozens of scam centers across Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia.
As well as human trafficking and fraud, the scam centers are frequently linked to money laundering and online casinos.
Some “local networks,” including one based in Brooklyn, New York, also worked on behalf of the Prince Group, the indictment says.
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.
Criminals responsible for mass romance and investment scams, commonly referred to as “pig butchering,” have embezzled tens of billions of dollars from victims worldwide over the last five years. Law enforcement has now launched one of its largest operations to date against that extensive scam industry, focusing on the owners of multiple modern slavery scam compounds in Southeast Asia, where hundreds of thousands of victims of human trafficking have been coerced into managing the fraud schemes on behalf of criminal gangs.
Authorities in the United States and the United Kingdom took coordinated action against a large Cambodian organization and its leader on Tuesday, who is accused of operating a number of well-known scam centers in the nation. Financial sanctions have been imposed on 146 “targets” connected to the recently identified Prince Group Transnational Criminal Organization, according to the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Targeting people and front businesses connected to the purported criminal enterprise is part of this action. At the time of the announcement, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) had also seized nearly 130,000 bitcoin, valued at approximately $15 billion, as part of the FBI’s sweeping action. This was the largest cryptocurrency seizure in US history.
The Prince Holding Group, a Cambodian company, its chairman and CEO Chen Zhi, and his associates and business partners comprise this Prince Group organized crime group, according to OFAC. The business publicly identifies itself as “one of the largest conglomerates in Cambodia” and claims to be engaged in financial services and real estate development. Nonetheless, the DOJ claims that Chen and other executives “grew Prince Group into one of Asia’s largest transnational criminal organizations” and operated at least ten scam compounds throughout Cambodia “in secret.”.
Joseph Nocella Jr. stated, “As alleged, the defendant directed one of the largest investment fraud operations in history, fueling an illicit industry that is reaching epidemic proportions.”. in a statement from the Eastern District of New York’s US attorney. “Investment scams run by the Prince Group have cost victims worldwide billions of dollars in losses and unimaginable suffering. According to the DOJ, Chen has not been taken into custody and is still at large.
In a statement, British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said, “The masterminds behind these horrific scam centers are ruining the lives of vulnerable people and buying up London homes to store their money.”. Financial sanctions were also imposed by the UK on Chen, the Prince Group, and other associated companies. The UK’s sanctions also “freeze” properties and companies that are purportedly connected to Chen in London, such as a £100 million ($133 million) office building in the City of London and a £12 million ($16 million) mansion in North London.
A WIRED email sent to a Prince Holding Group media contact address was instantly returned.
John Wojcik, a senior threat researcher specializing in Asia at security firm Infoblox, who previously monitored scam compounds and Southeast Asian cybercrime at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says that today’s coordinated action is the most significant blow yet to cybercrime networks operating out of Southeast Asia. According to Wojcik, this does not seem to have been “just another criminal syndicate—it was one of the largest cybercriminal and money laundering enterprises, and a clear leader in criminal fintech and infrastructure that was operating in the region.”. “”.
Elliptic, a crypto-tracing company, noted in a blog post on Tuesday that the bitcoins that US law enforcement had confiscated actually seem to be the same money that was purportedly taken in 2020 from a Chinese cryptocurrency mining company named Lubian. This is another, as yet unidentified, twist. According to the indictment filed today, Lubian was involved in Chen Zhi’s money laundering scheme, which may have involved transferring funds from a corrupt scam into cryptocurrency mining equipment that would generate new, clean coins free of criminal activity.
It’s unclear who stole the money in 2020 or even if there was a theft. Elliptic cofounder Tom Robinson speculates that Chen Zhi may have staged the theft as part of a money laundering operation to muddle the financial trail. The second possibility is that the theft was real. It might have been the United States government. However, the likelihood that it was someone else is higher. Robinson claims that US law enforcement may have later located the thief and taken the money from them subsequently.
Apart from money-laundering, crypto mining, and enigmatic thefts, Chen is charged in the indictment with being a key participant in the Chinese-speaking pig butchering industry. In the past ten years, Southeast Asian organized crime groups have run dozens of scam centers in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. Fraudulent job advertisements, usually in the tech sector, have been used to entice people from over 60 countries to work in scam compounds, which are frequently operated by Chinese organized crime groups. People frequently have their passports revoked when they get to the compounds, after which they are compelled to participate in a variety of online scams that prey on victims worldwide. They may be tortured or beaten if they refuse to comply. The scam centers are commonly associated with fraud, human trafficking, money laundering, and online casinos.
The Prince Group allegedly ran over 100 companies across 30 countries, according to the DOJ indictment against Chen and seven unidentified co-conspirators. It also names a number of other purported subsidiaries. According to the indictment, a few “local networks,” including one with its headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, also operated on behalf of the Prince Group. According to the report, Chen and company executives have been building and running “forced-labor scam compounds” throughout Cambodia since 2015. They also allegedly “used their political influence in multiple countries to protect their criminal enterprise,” including from Chinese intelligence agency the Ministry of State Security and Chinese police officials.
“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 alleges, adding that there were “ledgers of bribes to public officials.”. According to one document purportedly owned by Chen, two scam centers had 1,250 cell phones that “controlled” 76,000 social media profiles. Chen allegedly had pictures showing “Prince Group’s violent methods” against victims of human trafficking to the scam centers, according to the indictment. Images of beaten and bloodied people are included in the document.
In terms of both cryptocurrency and money in general, the seizure of 127,271 bitcoins, which were valued at over $15 billion at the time of their confiscation, is by far the largest financial seizure in the history of the US Justice Department. Prior to that, a billion-dollar seizure of bitcoins purportedly taken from the Silk Road dark-web drug market by an unidentified hacker in 2020 set a record for US law enforcement. In 2022, 95,000 bitcoins valued at $3.66 billion were seized from a Manhattan couple who later admitted to stealing them from the Bitfinex exchange. In the meantime, 61,000 bitcoins valued at $6.77 billion were seized by UK police in June from a Chinese woman who was suspected of engaging in an investment scam. This amount was less than half of the money taken from the Prince Group operation, but it was still larger than those US records.
Noting that the seizure is still a “small fraction” of the money made by scam centers, Ari Redbord, global head of policy at crypto-tracing company TRM Labs, said, “It’s important to note that this seizure is extraordinary not only for its scale but for what it represents.”. According to Redbord, “these are not isolated scams; they are factory-scale operations driven by forced labor, accelerated by the speed and scale of cryptocurrency, and linked by sophisticated money-laundering infrastructure that spans Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, China, and beyond.”.
According to Redbord, the widespread action “strikes at the operational and financial core” of the ecosystem of scam centers. Scholars who have been monitoring scam compounds in Southeast Asia in recent years have observed their explosive growth and use of money obtained illegally to fund increasingly sophisticated scam operations. Scam compounds have been observed to be spreading outside of Southeast Asia during the last two years, with locations appearing in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Africa.
“The US and UK are dismantling the economic engine that sustains these crimes by targeting the financial architecture—the shell companies, banks, exchanges, and real estate that move and hide these proceeds,” Redbord claims. A coordinated, data-driven, worldwide counter-threat finance campaign is what a 21st-century campaign looks like. “”.
More details regarding the confiscated bitcoins being linked to a purported theft from the Lubian mining operation were added at 2:30 PM ET on October 14, 2025.
