Over the last five years, criminals behind widespread romance and investment scams—often inelegantly referred to as “pig butchering”—have stolen tens of billions from people around the world. Now law enforcement has carried out one of its biggest operations yet against that sprawling scam industry, targeting the operators of several modern slavery scam compounds in Southeast Asia—where, as a whole, hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims have been forced to run the fraud operations on behalf of criminal gangs.
On Tuesday, officials in the United States and United Kingdom took coordinated action against one giant Cambodian organization and its boss who has allegedly run a series of notorious scam centers in the country. The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced it has issued financial sanctions against 146 “targets” linked to the newly designated Prince Group Transnational Criminal Organization. This action includes targeting individuals and shell companies linked to the alleged criminal enterprise. As part of the sweeping action also involving the FBI, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has also seized almost 130,000 bitcoin worth around $15 billion at the time of the announcement—the largest US cryptocurrency seizure to date.
This Prince Group organized crime entity, OFAC says, is made up of the Prince Holding Group, a Cambodia-based company, its chairman and CEO Chen Zhi, and his associates and business partners. Publicly, the company describes itself as “one of the largest conglomerates in Cambodia” and says it is involved in real estate development and financial services. However, the DOJ alleges that “in secret” Chen and other executives “grew Prince Group into one of Asia’s largest transnational criminal organizations” and ran at least 10 scam compounds across Cambodia.
“As alleged, the defendant directed one of the largest investment fraud operations in history, fueling an illicit industry that is reaching epidemic proportions,” Joseph Nocella, Jr, a US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. “Prince Group’s investment scams have caused billions of dollars in losses and untold misery to victims around the world.” Chen has not been arrested and remains at large, the DOJ says.
“The masterminds behind these horrific scam centers are ruining the lives of vulnerable people and buying up London homes to store their money,” Britain’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said in a statement. The UK also placed financial sanctions on Chen, the Prince Group, and other linked entities. The UK’s sanctions also “freeze” businesses and properties allegedly linked to Chen in London, including a £12 million mansion in North London and a £100 million office building in the City of London.
A WIRED email to an address listed as a media contact on the Prince Holding Group website immediately bounced back.
“Today’s coordinated action represents the most consequential blow yet to cybercrime networks operating out of Southeast Asia,” says John Wojcik, a senior threat researcher focussed on Asia at security firm Infoblox, who previously tracked scam compounds and Southeast Asian cybercrime at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Wojcik claims that this doesn’t appear to have been “just another criminal syndicate—it was one of the region’s largest cybercriminal and money laundering enterprises, and a clear leader in criminal fintech and infrastructure.”
Over the last decade, organized crime gangs operating out of Southeast Asia have operated dozens of scam centers across Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. Often run by Chinese organized crime groups, the scam compounds have lured people from more than 60 countries around the world to work in them by using fraudulent job advertisments—often within the tech sector. When people arrive at the compounds, they often have their passports taken away from them and are then forced to run a wide range of online scams, targeting other people around the world. If they don’t comply, they are sometimes beaten or tortured. As well as human trafficking and fraud, the scam centers are frequently linked to money laundering and online casinos.
The DOJ indictment against Chen and seven unnamed co-conspirators alleges that the Prince Group operated more than 100 businesses in 30 countries and names several other alleged subsidiaries. Some “local networks,” including one based in Brooklyn, New York, also worked on behalf of the Prince Group, the indictment says. It claims that since 2015 Chen and company executives built and operated “forced-labor scam compounds” across Cambodia and “used their political influence in multiple countries to protect their criminal enterprise,” including from China’s police officials and Chinese intelligence agency the Ministry of State Security.
“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.”
