Inside the $20 Billion Crypto Scam Empire the U.S. Government Finally Moved to Crush

The entire, physical infrastructure of the fraud operation is visible in one of the photos included in court documents filed in the Eastern District of New York. Hundreds of cell phones, each plugged into its own power source and with a glowing screen, were arranged in metal racks that lined the room from floor to ceiling. These weren’t phones that were ready to be sold or shipped. They were at work. Tens of thousands of phony social media profiles were being created by the facility, which was run around the clock in Cambodia by individuals who had been promised real jobs but were instead imprisoned in a compound and used scripts on strangers thousands of miles away.

In October 2025, the US Department of Justice released its case against Chen Zhi and the Prince Group, describing it as one of the largest financial takedowns in history. The language is supported by the numbers. The largest cryptocurrency forfeiture the Justice Department has ever carried out was the seizure of about 127,271 bitcoin, which is worth between $14 and $15 billion depending on the day. In a coordinated joint operation, the UK government froze 19 properties in London alone that belonged to Chen’s network, including a £12 million mansion in North London and an office building in central London valued at almost £100 million. Even by the standards of large-scale financial crime, the size of what had been constructed and the range of where the money had gone are astounding.

The prosecution claimed that Chen Zhi, a citizen of Cambodia, oversaw one of the biggest transnational criminal groups in Asia through his Prince Group, a business whose publicly accessible website listed its operations as financial services and real estate development. There is a huge discrepancy between that presentation and what the prosecution claims is true.

According to the DOJ, the Prince Group constructed and ran at least ten scam compounds across Cambodia, all of which were intended to increase the number of contacts with possible victims. In two facilities alone, there were 1,250 cell phones that controlled about 76,000 social media accounts. These phones were used for “pig butchering,” a type of fraud in which victims are gradually persuaded to transfer cryptocurrency into platforms that seem legitimate but are actually controlled by the fraudsters over the course of weeks or months through fictitious romantic relationships or investment mentorship. The cash vanishes. The partnership ends. The connection vanishes.

You remember the training materials that prosecutors discovered in Prince Group documents. Employees received advice on how to establish rapport with victims. One of the guidelines is to avoid using profile pictures of women who are “too beautiful,” as this will make the accounts appear phony. The advice suggests a thorough understanding of how people build trust online and a methodical attempt to take advantage of that process on a large scale. It is said that millions of mobile phone numbers were obtained. To perform call center operations, “phone farms” were established. Everything was designed with reach in mind. Additionally, the individuals carrying out the actual scam work in the compounds were not volunteers. They were trafficked workers, foreign nationals who had been brought in under false pretenses and imprisoned in conditions that Amnesty International had previously detailed in a report on scam centers in Cambodia, including accounts of torture and forced labor.

When announcing the charges, Assistant Attorney General John Eisenberg referred to the Prince Group as “a criminal enterprise built on human suffering.” The business allegedly used a formula that is becoming more prevalent in Southeast Asian cybercrime networks: human trafficking to staff the fraud operations, cryptocurrency to receive payments and obscure flows, and money laundered into luxury goods and real estate. The Prince Group wasn’t working alone. It was part of a larger network of underground Chinese-language marketplaces that handle tens of billions of dollars’ worth of illegal transactions every year. A distinct round of British financial sanctions was imposed in March 2026 on Xinbi Guarantee, a Telegram-based black market that handled an estimated $20 billion in transactions. The market was targeted for selling services such as money laundering infrastructure and, according to WIRED’s reporting, electrified shackles—restraints used in the trafficking operations.

The items that were purportedly bought with the funds Chen Zhi’s network produced provide insight into the type of proceeds: rare artwork, private jets, and watches. A Picasso painting purchased at an auction house in New York City was one of the purchases mentioned by the prosecution. International law enforcement has found it difficult to track down and stop the flow of money from a scam victim wiring cryptocurrency from their home, through a phone farm in a Cambodian compound, and into a New York art auction. The fact that it eventually became traceable in this instance and resulted in the biggest bitcoin seizure in history illustrates both the true cost of letting this infrastructure continue to function for years before meaningful action was taken and the increasing sophistication of blockchain analytics.

Chen Zhi is still at large. He has been charged by the DOJ, the Prince Group has been sanctioned, properties in London have been frozen, and the US government currently has 127,000 bitcoin. The slow-moving diplomatic channels will determine whether the charges result in an extradition and conviction. To put it mildly, the relationship between the Cambodian government and the type of Chinese-run criminal organizations that have been active in the nation for many years is complex. The Senate of Cambodia approved an anti-cybercrime measure in April 2026, which for the first time makes operating these scam compounds potentially punishable by life in prison. However, laws against these operations are only now being seriously legislated.

The phone farm shown in the picture of the court document is no longer in use. Presumably, the compound where it was kept is still in existence. There is no clear answer to the question of how many more are running.