\n<\/p>\n
\u201cChen 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 \u2018sha zhu,\u2019 or pig-butchering,\u201d the indictment claims, alleging there were also \u201cledgers of bribes to public officials.\u201d One document allegedly held by Chen listed that two scam centers were equipped with 1,250 mobile phones that \u201ccontrolled\u201d 76,000 social media accounts. The indictment also claims that Chen held images demonstrating \u201cPrince Group\u2019s violent methods\u201d against people who had been trafficked to the scam centers. The document includes images showing people bloodied and beaten.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s history\u2014not 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s important to note that this seizure is extraordinary not only for its scale but for what it represents,\u201d Ari Redbord, global head of policy at crypto-tracing firm TRM Labs, adding that the seizure is still a \u201csmall fraction\u201d of the money generated by scam centers. \u201cThese 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,\u201d Redbord says.<\/p>\n
Redbord says the widespread action \u201cstrikes at the operational and financial core\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy targeting the financial architecture\u2014the shell companies, banks, exchanges, and real estate that move and hide these proceeds\u2014the US and UK are dismantling the economic engine that sustains these crimes,\u201d Redbord says. \u201cThis is what a 21st-century counter-threat finance campaign looks like\u2014coordinated, data-driven, and global.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cChen 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 \u2018sha zhu,\u2019 or pig-butchering,\u201d the indictment claims, alleging there were also \u201cledgers of bribes to public officials.\u201d One document allegedly held by Chen listed that two scam centers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[1038,5253,15175,6893,3281,9228,7572,8020],"class_list":{"0":"post-28013","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-alleged","9":"tag-billion","10":"tag-bitcoin","11":"tag-empire","12":"tag-feds","13":"tag-recordbreaking","14":"tag-scam","15":"tag-seize"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}