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Over the last five years, criminals behind widespread romance and investment scams\u2014often inelegantly referred to as \u201cpig butchering\u201d\u2014have 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\u2014where, as a whole, hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims have been forced to run the fraud operations on behalf of criminal gangs.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced it has issued financial sanctions against 146 \u201ctargets\u201d 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\u2014the largest US cryptocurrency seizure to date.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cone of the largest conglomerates in Cambodia\u201d and says it is involved in real estate development and financial services. However, the DOJ alleges that \u201cin secret\u201d Chen and other executives \u201cgrew Prince Group into one of Asia\u2019s largest transnational criminal organizations\u201d and ran at least 10 scam compounds across Cambodia.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs alleged, the defendant directed one of the largest investment fraud operations in history, fueling an illicit industry that is reaching epidemic proportions,\u201d Joseph Nocella, Jr, a US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. \u201cPrince Group\u2019s investment scams have caused billions of dollars in losses and untold misery to victims around the world.\u201d Chen has not been arrested and remains at large, the DOJ says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe masterminds behind these horrific scam centers are ruining the lives of vulnerable people and buying up London homes to store their money,\u201d Britain\u2019s 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\u2019s sanctions also \u201cfreeze\u201d businesses and properties allegedly linked to Chen in London, including a \u00a312 million mansion in North London and a \u00a3100 million office building in the City of London.<\/p>\n
A WIRED email to an address listed as a media contact on the Prince Holding Group website immediately bounced back.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday\u2019s coordinated action represents the most consequential blow yet to cybercrime networks operating out of Southeast Asia,\u201d 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 \u201cjust another criminal syndicate\u2014it was one of the region\u2019s largest cybercriminal and money laundering enterprises, and a clear leader in criminal fintech and infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2014often 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201clocal networks,\u201d 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 \u201cforced-labor scam compounds\u201d across Cambodia and \u201cused their political influence in multiple countries to protect their criminal enterprise,\u201d including from China\u2019s police officials and Chinese intelligence agency the Ministry of State Security.<\/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":"
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story Over the last five years, criminals behind widespread romance and investment scams\u2014often inelegantly referred to as \u201cpig butchering\u201d\u2014have 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35238,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-35237","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}