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DOJ Seizes $15 Billion In Bitcoin From Massive 'Pig Butchering' Scam Based In Cambodia (cnbc.com) 70

Posted by BeauHD from the DOJ-goes-hog-wild dept.
The U.S. Department of Justice seized about $15 billion in bitcoin from wallets tied to Chen Zhi, founder of Cambodia's Prince Holding Group, who is accused of running one of the world's biggest "pig butchering" scams. Prosecutors say Zhi's network trafficked people into forced-labor scam compounds that defrauded victims worldwide through fake crypto investment schemes. CNBC reports: The seizure is the largest forfeiture action by the DOJ in history. An indictment charging the alleged pig butcher, Chen Zhi, was unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn, New York. Zhi, who is also known as "Vincent," remains at large, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York. He was identified in court filings as the founder and chairman of Prince Holding Group, a multinational business conglomerate based in Cambodia, which prosecutors said grew "in secret .... into one of Asia's largest transnational criminal organizations. [...]

The scams duped people contacted via social media and messaging applications online into transferring cryptocurrency into accounts controlled by the scheme with false promises that the crypto would be invested and produce profits, according to the office. "In reality, the funds were stolen from the victims and laundered for the benefit of the perpetrators," the release said. "The scam perpetrators often built relationships with their victims over time, earning their trust before stealing their funds."

Prosecutors said that hundreds of people were trafficked and forced to work in the scam compounds, "often under the threat of violence." Zhi and a network of top executives in the Prince Group are accused of using political influence in multiple countries to protect their criminal enterprise and paid bribes to public officials to avoid actions by law enforcement authorities targeting the scheme, according to prosecutors.
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DOJ Seizes $15 Billion In Bitcoin From Massive 'Pig Butchering' Scam Based In Cambodia More

DOJ Seizes $15 Billion In Bitcoin From Massive 'Pig Butchering' Scam Based In Cambodia

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  • Good work! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @10:11PM (#65725646)

    Congratulations to the DOJ for doing serious damage to one of the most vile criminal enterprises of our time. They hit slavery, fraud, and graft in one fell swoop. At a time when the DOJ is being abused for shameless political vendettas it’s nice to see real good work being done.

    • It would be interesting to know how DOJ got access to the wallets but TFA doesn't say.
      • Thanks for reading .. that was my first question too ... so maybe the criminal group had "regular" wallet-as-a-service at a crypto exchange? You would think serious criminal managers would want a high level of independence, but you never know. Maybe their specialty was more in the intimidation skills than in IT. Lots of smart people have huge blindspots. Look at everyone using Microsoft.
      • I imagine they seized private keys + seed phrases when they hit the target location. Everybody writes that shit down somewhere.

        • Yes, they got private keys (Score:5, Informative)

          by bjamesv ( 1528503 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @11:36PM (#65725750)
          Yeah the second link in the summary says they got Zhi's offline wallets and private keys that "were in his possession". But it is not clear if FBI and 'partner' orgs simply sent Alphabet a National Security Letter so they could snoop through Zhi's gmail/gdrive files, or if they hacked his phone, or if an actual physical raid ever took place.

          Because Zhi is not in custody, and the same second link doesnt say anything about anyone going into a home or compound *and instead* alleges Zhi 'maintained documents describing and depicting "phone farms"' kind of makes it sound like no one ever went to Cambodia and Google just let them into his gdrive, etc. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.justice.gov%2Fopa%2Fpr... [justice.gov]

          • That would be a pretty funny if they got it off it gdrive. Master cyber-criminal indeed.

          • Of course, there's the possibility he had his GDrive set to download his files to the local drive.
            You can argue encryption and doing it all through the "cloud"... you open a webpage, at least a bit of it is on your computer.
            Of course... no encryption is 100% secure... 'I encrypt this post with something... you can't look at it without the key, so either I have to send the key to you or it has to be included in the header or something'
            Like I've said before, the governments have the decryption keys... would a

      • It would be interesting to know how DOJ got access to the wallets but TFA doesn't say.

        Yeah, I thought one of the major selling points of crypto was that it couldn't be seized by the government. Obviously, there's still the $5 wrench attack (which is actually a $21 wrench [homedepot.com] these days, thanks inflation), but having multiple crypto wallets would mean you could just surrender the one with the least amount of coin in it and deny any knowledge of the keys to the other wallets.

    • Not so fast, because there's still the question of what happens to the money. We know that it's mostly not going to victim compensation based on the $4B number cited as victim loss. So even if victims are 100% made whole (which won't happen), we still have $11B left over which will end up in LEO slush funds.
      • It could go to compensate the people he enslaved.

        • it could, but it wont.

          It will go to the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile which the president created earlier this year. It was created with the express purpose of utilizing the cryptocurrencies seized by US law enforcement.

        • You mean the pig butchers? That's a tough sell, I imagine.
          • I cannot blame them for what they were forced to do while enslaved. I'd imagine most people would feel that way.
    • Hmm, was there ever a time when the DOJ was not used for political vendettas?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Under Biden. His DoJ got raked over the coals mercilessly for not going after la Presidenta soon enough. And when they did over the top secret files he kept and showed to others without security clearance (and after leaving office so he should never have had them), they caught that slimeball red-handed and it took a crooked judge, whom he appointed and who was bucking for a position in his administration were he to be elected, to extract his tail from that crack. In doing so, she ginned up some new legal bu

        • Seriously? You're not looking hard enough. They all do it, and every administration gets exponentially worse with it.

    • Did you read the entire story, follow the links, and also "do your own research"?

      No, I'm not going to bother with so much work, but on the face of it, it seems the story just says they "captured" some of the loot. I'm pretty sure they didn't go to Cambodia and arrest anyone and don't even want to speculate how the passwords and account information were obtained. Near as I can tell, what the story means is that they were able to transfer a bunch of cryptocurrency into their control, but I don't even believe

    • Congratulations to the DOJ for doing serious damage to one of the most vile criminal enterprises of our time. They hit slavery, fraud, and graft in one fell swoop. At a time when the DOJ is being abused for shameless political vendettas itâ(TM)s nice to see real good work being done.

      Eh? All that happened was the dude failed to pay off the right people in Congress. Yes, the DOJ can do good things. No, the DOJ will not do good things if certain people ask it not to do so. An investment of less than 10% of his fortune would have yielded a free pass for his crimes in the USA. Some people never learn.

  • This is what Bitcoin became (Score:4, Insightful)

    by svoncrumb ( 10455028 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @10:25PM (#65725666)
    It was supposed to be a decentralised payments system. It has become a system of hoarding wealth -- particularly for the elite criminals. I wonder how much Putin alone has stored. The sooner it dies now the better. The experiment failed!

  • Had a friend near there. (Score:5, Informative)

    by labnet ( 457441 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @10:40PM (#65725688)

    He was part of a Christian mission group trying to rescue people who were trafficked.
    Victims land in Thailand thinking they have a job, get on the bus, then bus goes on a ferry and suddenly they are a lawless no mans land.

    60 minutes did a story on this not long ago.
    https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F... [youtube.com]

    • Yeah, we need to look at capital punishment for slavery.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Himmy32 ( 650060 )

        Stronger punishment is the smaller part of the equation of deterrence. It's the feeling of risk versus the likelihood of getting caught.
        We need to encourage improvements in enforcing the rule of law and good international police partnership. At the same time without discouraging infringing liberties and privacy. Simply being harder on crime doesn't solve the problem.
        • That assumes deterrence is the reason for punishment. You're not wrong about the need for better enforcement, which does have more of a deterrent effect than the nature of the punishment, but punishment is not for deterrence. I don't say we should consider capital punishment for slavers because I think it would stop slavery, I say we should consider it because their crime is so appalling that it might not be forgivable by other humans.

          As I see it, there are two reasons for capital punishment. One is t

  • These bitcoins will show the information for the last person who handled this bitcoin before it fell into the hands of the scammers. The only decent thing to do is look that up and return it. Some of it won't be possible but many honest men and women bought this bitcoin from exchanges where they gave their identities in the process.

  • Or what is the current bitcoin rate again?

  • Cash it in... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kbrannen ( 581293 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @03:06AM (#65725904)

    Yeah, the coins stolen need to be returned to the victims. After that, you'd have $X billion left over. What if all of that was sold off for real dollars? I wonder how much the value of bitcoins would plummet? I ask because I've heard it's got such a high value because the bulk of it is held making it scarce, so selling a lot of it would be ... interesting. After all, you can't really fund anything if it's not converted to cold hard cash.

    • Cash is printed infinitely, no one wants to hold it, so there are always buyers of anything and everything. $15 billion is pocket change, the US government was sending that much to inmates during COVID, maybe more, no one knows, the smallest unit that is accounted for is $1 trillion (soon to be quadrillion).

  • If there were no crypto, these scams would be so much harder.

  • $15 billion?? How the hell did he think he was going to get away with that, much less spend it all???
  • Live feed is healthy for mass marketing. PBJ rolls have tonnes of carb raters. Bulk Bogan was farmed for bad throat burglery. Thank god "cmdrtaco" made a bikeshed a sandwich.

  • Opportunity for some US/China collaboration (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nicolaiplum ( 169077 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @07:03AM (#65726114)

    These criminal enterprises in the Golden Triangle area that involve defrauding people (as opposed to the ones that involve, say, drug trafficking) are often using enslaved Chinese citizens to defraud other Chinese citizens. The Chinese (PRC) Government is actually concerned about this, as the fraud levelshat h are high enough to cause domestic discontent.

    This would be an actual opportunity for the US Government to build some collaboration, instead of conflict, with the PRC Government over an issue that they are both concerned about and that has no domestic downside for either of them... if they wanted to. Especially, if the US wanted to.

  • The seizure is a significant blow to this criminal organization. Great job!

    But the summary is light on details about the victims. Are the "pigs" that got scammed going to get any remuneration from that $15B? Are the trafficked operators still enslaved?

    It also doesn't mention any other penalties. Zhi is still at large. (And, if he was has any intelligence, has enough wealth stashed away to live the high life in any number of criminal-hiding countries). Are any other members of the Prince organiza
  • what gives the DOJ any right to steal it or keep the funds? There is nothing to say it was US based in the summary.
    • Well they got a judgement in US courts, which in olden times would have meant the money was tied up in US financial institutions/instruments of some kind, with digital assets jurisdiction may be murkier but they would've had a judge sign off, and they aren't all as calvinball as SCOTUS is these days so there's a chance there's a legitimate argument.

    • Some of the victims of the scam were US citizens. This gives the US Department of Justice a responsibility to investigate and to shut down the scammers if they can.

      The investigators determined that these assets are the proceeds of the scam, and that seizing these assets will significantly impact the scammers ability to continue scamming. So the DoJ attorney goes to a Judge and lays out this logic and asks for a seizure order. Judge agrees, and it happens.

      The article is specifically about the seizure of t

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