DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chairman-prince-group-indicte...
Well done DOJ. Hopefully the victims get their money back.
How about cash it out and trickle it down to us... or is all that just gonna magically disappear?
Unless this went through a mixer, Bitcoin is quite transparent.
Still easier to just transfer it all to the Treasury of course and screw the victims which is probably what will happen.
Based on current judicial trends, they’ll probably get Coinbase coupons worth 50% of a different coin or something.
In theory the court should give them back the actual bitcoin, not the monetary equivalent at the time.
Why? Most of them didn't care about bitcoin, they bought it solely to give to the scammer.
After all, if someone stole $1k of gold from someone a decade ago, is giving them (now deflated) $1k USD fair, or is giving them the same physical amount (now worth) $3k in gold fairer? Even if they bought the gold because the scammer asked them too.
The ‘fair enough’ treatment would be to give them the dollar equivalent at the time they gave the bitcoin to the scammer, and the rest goes… to the gov’t? As ‘payment’ for recovering it all and making the payment happen? Or to penalize the scammers? But actually the victims lost a lot of monetary value due to inflation, and lost gains from bitcoin price increasing.
The ‘meh, won’t get anyone run out of town with pitchforks’ is the gov’t seizes the bitcoin, punishes the offenders (how?), and somehow gives warm fuzzies to the victims without actually giving them anything to make their financial pain any better. Aka business as usual. Bonus points if you make them give more money to another party to do it (aka the ‘class action shuffle’ that has gotten popular in the last few decades).
After all, if someone stole $1k of gold from someone a decade ago, is giving them (now deflated) $1k USD fair, or is giving them the same physical amount (now worth) $3k in gold fairer? Even if they bought the gold because the scammer asked them too.
I think that's an important difference. The fair thing is to "make them whole", to restore them to as if they'd never met the scammer. If they had a stash of gold that got stolen, the fair thing is to give them back that gold or the nearest equivalent. If they had a bunch of money that they sent to the scammer, the fair thing is to give them their money back; if they bought $50k in iTunes gift cards to send to the scammer we should be giving them back $50k, not 5,000,000 iTunes points. I don't see how that's any different for Bitcoin.
* It's not as simple as sending the transaction back to the previous holder
* With some basic detective work the paper trails exist to find many of the victims and verify the amount that was lost.
1. The feds can't take your money.
2. Once your money's gone, it's gone.
If criminals can't count on #1 holding true, and their victims can't count on #2 holding true, what is even the point of it?
The new promise of crypto is helping organized crime or sanctioned individuals/countries with payments, and it's delivering!
It's not even new - Bitcoin right from the start was explicitly created to replace a centralized system used by criminals to evade currency controls. Bitcoin's creator(s?) saw that the various governments were eventually able to shut that down and set up Bitcoin as a decentralized system to avoid that problem.
It's not a flaw in crypto that criminals flock to it - it is built into the very design. This story shows that it is not perfect but to criminals it is the best that they have.
There's no thing that the feds can't have because they have an infinite amount of sanctions violence and tools at their disposal to make anyone do what they want, one way or another.
More information as the mystery deepens, it's not proceeds from just the pig butchering
https://www.elliptic.co/blog/15-billion-us-seizure-reveals-p...
So yea, there are massive amounts of money involved.
[0]https://www.searchengine.show/whos-behind-these-scammy-text-...
Wouldn't surprise me, if the DOJ had some "under-the-table" help from Chinese sources, but not in any way that anyone can prove.
If you don't want to sign up for a podcast, John Oliver did a fairly decent bit about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg
Admittedly it's doubtful whether this kind of activity would be captured by official statistics.
I know it’s a bit of a get out clause but it’s at least not obvious to me that this wouldn’t contribute, certainly the illegal nature is not a blocker for being counted in GDP.
1/3 of the country's entire GDP
$15 billion is a huge number to be sure, but it's unclear from the article how many years it took to acquire.
The DOJ adds seized crypto to the American crypto reserve. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...
From the webpage: " The Executive Order begins to resolve the current disjointed handling of cryptocurrencies seized through forfeiture by, and scattered across, various Federal agencies. Currently, no clear policy exists for managing these assets, leading to a lack of accountability and inadequate exploration of options to centralize, secure, or maximize their value. Taking affirmative steps to centralize ownership, control, and management of these assets within the Federal government will ensure proper oversight, accurate tracking, and a cohesive approach to managing the government’s cryptocurrency holdings. This move harnesses the power of digital assets for national prosperity, rather than letting them languish in limbo. "
Really poor financial management to have all that money concentrated that much though. It either means they dropped the ball bigly, or this is spare change for them... although Bitcoin's market cap is $2.24 trillion at the moment, $15 billion is a significant chunk of that.
I bet somebody wrote down their password, too scared of what would happen to them if they were to forget it.
Trying to liquidate $15bn to USD reasonably quickly would very likely cause a massive drop the price, which would correspondingly drop the market cap by potentially many times that $15bn.
Cambodia is just a proxy, a land where the Chinese gangs act with impunity. Earned with slave work, money is laundered in casinos and no Cambodian is seeing a cent of it.
Might as well say "nearly unfathomable amount of money in Congo" because that's just how disconnected the money is to the country.
And BTW it is not just the Chinese, there are innumerable other operators, including a whole bunch of smaller 'startups'.
They operate because Cambodia openly accepts it, and takes a cut, not because they are somehow so clever as to disguise the real business being conducted in closed-up apartment blocks.
There's areas in Laos and Cambodia they control where it literally operates under a different set of laws. One of the areas, I think in Laos, Americans aren't even allowed to enter
In the case of Myanmar, I think their biggest problem is the country has been in a war for decades with loads of various factions and it's too chaotic for any government to attempt to get anything under control.
And bordering countries like Thailand are running into issues where people are getting trafficked through Thailand to these other countries. So it's actually ruining the reputation of Thailand and lots of Chinese people are wary of traveling to Thailand because of it
To provide a bit more context what happens is Chinese people will give fake job offers to their fellow Chinese and then basically kidnap them when they arrive to Thailand and take them to another country to work in a scam center
I heard an agent got court for opening bank accounts for them in Pattaya, over 500 accounts. We have had crackdowns on banking here in Thailand ever since.
The spectre of a similar scam has resulted in lower Chinese tourism to Thailand. Basically Chinese (among other nationalities) tourists were led from the airport by fake immigration staff, put into cars and driven to Burma and forced to work 18 hour days in scam call centers.
A chilling but extremely worthwhile read.
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/SOUTHEASTASIA-SCAMS/mypmxwd...
Vietnam was by far my favorite of the three and the contrast between the three countries is stark.
Spent significant time in Vietnam & Cambodia & Thailand. Cambodia is a sad country full of desperate people.
Probably should also include which country is responsible for the current condition of the country.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1175241-once-you-ve-been-to...
I had to read up, and...my goodness.
Apparently the US bombed a neutral Cambodia secretly to incite Vietnam's neighboring countries and put pressure on them, killing 30k to 150k civilians. This caused unrest, and gave way to Khmer Rouge to sieze power, using "defense against the US" as propoganda.
The Chin, Hmong, and Lao are some of the nicest people you will ever meet, too.
Why can't Americans (and to some extent Europeans) just come out and say, "Yea, we are often assholes and we have self interests. That's why we do these atrocities. It's not because of 'freedom'"? At least be honest.
Just because you have freedom of speech doesn't mean you do the right things nor does it mean you are fighting the right cause.
Unfortunately, 9/11 slammed us hard back into being angry and defensive. COVID just made it worse...
It will probably be a generation until we calm back down. Or Putin/Xi dies. Whichever comes first.
The US involvement in Vietnam would have already been over before the uprising of Pot had Nixon and Kissinger not skuttled peace talks to help Nixon get elected.
The Khmer Rouge and other opposition groups were fighting the government in an armed conflict since 1950. The Khmer Rouge controlled almost half of Cambodia’s territory 10 years before the bombing.
In the grand scheme of Cambodias civil war, the US bombing didn’t play that big a role at all.
See a discussion of “proximate cause.”[1]
[1] https://legalclarity.org/what-is-the-difference-between-dire...
The ideological content of the Khmer Rouge is very poor overall, and is a mix between nationalism and communism aiming to "clean" the nation from western influences. Which is kind of ironic given Pol Pot's background.
It really cannot be overstated. The developing world is still developing thanks to it's own institutional issues, to be sure, as everywhere else on the globe struggles with, but America has never had a larger, stronger America come in and just fuck it right up for literally no reason apart from larger geopolitical games.
it really is disgusting to see this level of corruption and that its going to have long term economic impact on Cambodia and Cambodians abroad.
The stories ranged from video of people running away from these places to escape, to Vietnamese police bribing people back to Vietnam who had been lured with the promise of a good job.
Cambodia really is the Wild West of this stuff.
https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_31797410 (sorry Chinese)
Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos
This one of the other organizations / major bank used for money laundering directly linked to Hun Sen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huione_Group
The company is linked to Cambodia's ruling Hun family, which includes the current prime minister, Hun Manet.[4] His cousin Hun To is a major shareholder and director of Huione Pay
Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos
Are you saying that 30-50% of Cambodia's economy can be directly attributed to scamming and casinos? I find that shocking and hard to believe. Do you have a source for that statement?
The UK government says it has frozen assets owned by his network, including 19 properties in London - one of which is worth nearly £100m ($133m).
the UK was enabling this guy before he got too much heat.
How does this quote indicate that the UK was enabling Zhi?
There's very few opportunities for a small country without resources.
Between 1965 and 1973 US dropped 2,756,941 tones of bombs on 113,717 sites in Cambidia. Thats more bombs than all allies together used in all of World War II.
Tens of people still getting killed by them every year.
https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabomb...
Second, most of the money would not make it to the Cambodian economy. It is likely laundered abroad. The whole operation is likely multinational, with only the workforce located in Cambodia.
(not only for these cambodia originated crimes)
Also keep in mind all the bribes, all the money laundering mentioned in the article by the 100s of affiliated subsidiares of the criminal group all in Cambodia
the big casinos which directly and indirectly support additional laundering
https://www.fincen.gov/system/files/2025-10/Huione-Group-Fin...
https://www.kharon.com/brief/huione-group-cambodia-treasury-...
Every business has revenue / costs
The indictment mentions they were doing 30M/day ~ 10B / year, could be an old message when they were smaller
Guessing that's revenue
They're just one of many organizations in the "industry"
I agree about digital payments, but one of the things that I found disappointingly complex about Bitcoin is needing to receive change when making a payment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unspent_transaction_output).
I only made a few Bitcoin transactions because I found the whole experience did not feel like the future. That was a while ago now, and as other commentors have pointed out, it not seems obvious that the real value in Bitcoin lies elsewhere.
the economy is not that big to start with :)
GDP $49.8 Billion (nominal; 2025)
Some examples
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/cambodia...
the virtual cold war against the personal finances of foreign citizenry
Comparing a scam to war is inaccurate. The Cold War was a war running cold with the potential to go hot. Cambodia and America are not going to war over this.
Meanwhile, China never cracked down against similar scams in Cambodia. Most notably, Prince Group remains unsanctioned in China and it's leadership are Mainland Chinese in origin.
While pig butchering (along with opium and human trafficking and other organized crime activities) are a major reason behind Chinese involvement in Myanmar, ignoring the very real proxy war going on between Chinese and Indian interests in Myanmar fails to contextualize some of the decisions that both countries make within Myanmar.
This also explains why you don't see a similar crackdown in Cambodia, which is solidly within the Chinese sphere at this point.
[0]https://www.stimson.org/2025/rare-earths-and-realpolitik-fut...
[1]https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/war-against-the-junta/ignorin...
[2]https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-explores-rare-eart...
the EAO that was providing protection to Chinese pig-butchering gangs in that region of Myanmar (Kachin Independence Army)
Kachin is not a relevant location of scam centers. You can find articles that claim otherwise, e.g. https://www.ctol.digital/news/inside-worlds-largest-scam-emp... but from the fact that they mention the Thai border and the city of Myawaddy, which is in Kayin/Karen State, it's clear that they're just confusing Kachin and Kayin.
The Kachin Independence Army seems to finance itself through mining instead.
While it's true that some scammers were recently sentenced to death in China https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78nrx309kzo and this only happened after the Kachin Independence Army disrupted the rare-earth trade with China, that's just a temporal coincidence. The scammers were captured in 2023 in Laukkai in northern Shan State near the Chinese border by the MNDAA (an anti-junta armed group dominated by ethnic Chinese) as part of Operation 1027. China is rumored to have assisted the operation in order to crack down on the scam centers in junta-controlled territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_1027#Cyber-scamming_... The Kachin Independence Army also participated in Operation 1027, but in Kachin, not Shan.
I don't know about Cambodia.
As a result of that failure, all the Northern Alliance members began trying to pivot to other states or in the case of the MNDAA faced the brunt of the Chinese crackdown.
[0]https://www.bnionline.net/en/news/juntamndaa-peace-talks-doo...
Maybe the reduction of Chinese support encouraged the Kachin Independence Army to seek cooperation with India, but you seemed to be claiming that causality was in the opposite direction (while also misidentifying who was running the scam centers), which I think is clearly contradicted by the timeline of events.
It does not have anti-terrorism law to operate in other countries
China literally runs black ops offices in New York[1] and Australia.
also it does not want to upset Cambodia or Myanmar government when not necessary
There is no government in Myanmar. China (and India) heavily intervene in that conflict.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/new-york-resident-pl...
It's reminiscent of stories about Russian malware doing nothing on machines with Cyrillic keyboard layouts.
Cambodia continues to have scam centers targeting Putonghua speakers (including PRC nationals), but there hasn't been a similar crackdown on such activities due to Chinese pressure.
The crackdown in Kokang happened after China flipped to supporting the Tatmadaw against the Northern Alliance[0] and India began peeling historically India-aligned members of the alliance like the KIA and the Arakan Army back into Indian orbit[1].
P.S. Circa 2 years ago, a large portion of Chinese in SF Chinatown became Kokang and Cambodian Chinese. Bamar, Kuki-Zo, and Kachin Myanmarese primarily reside in Daly City, Ingleside/Outer Mission, and Oakland/East Bay.
SF has a lot of Asian and Latiné subcultures and communities - it's kind of insane how underdocumented it is under the guise of "Asian" and "Latino"
[0]https://www.stimson.org/2025/too-little-too-late-china-steps...
[1]https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/india-extends-unp...
we are at war with many countries all the time, most of it is cold
Like whom? We (and let's be honest, every other great power) are at war with many countries all of the time, and while they may be cold for long stretches, they absolutely (a) go hot from time to time and (b) are constantly threatening to go hot.
To me "war" is a state of "no rules" hurting. IE nuclear, biological, any weapon goes. Anything less is an exercise in restraint - even if still quite terrible in it's own right.
Which means there are lots of "exercises" of varying lethality, risk profiles, spheres of influence, etc. And yes many countries are jockeying against other countries in varying ways.
Large scale scams against other countries could be seen as an unintended (not a planned government action) exercise that is condoned by the government.
The Cold War was a war running cold with the potential to go hot
I'm not sure I buy that definition. I think most understand a Cold War to be simply a "war" done without weapons but by other means — via economic means, propaganda, etc.
So did the U.S. hack this guy? Anyone who manages to build such a massive multi-national corporation with myriad illicit businesses but also dozens of legitimate businesses with thousands of employees - including a large bank with over 100,000 customers - and then operate it all for over a decade, doesn't strike me as someone who's trivially careless. I mean he managed to successfully protect that much money for a long time from his own criminal co-conspirators (who would certainly include hackers with insider knowledge of his operations), criminal competitors and all the people he was bribing like senior Cambodian politicians, law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
This just strikes me as either a very lucky break or a perhaps a sign that the FBI is adopting a new playbook to go after shielded international operations like this. Like maybe involving U.S. and 'Five Eyes' intelligence assets.
My assumption is that at this point they just have orders from a judge allowing them to do it and they will find the means later.
1. they are lying. The most obvious one. It's legal and is expected that law enforcement lie in the United States.
2. defendant was so dumb he had the funds in a crypto exchange account
3. Law enforcement has no idea what keys or crypto is. Also likely, law enforcement in the US is not required to be competent.
4. defendant was so dumb he landed on a flight in the US. This would be exceptionally stupid
5. The US military or the intelligence community either coerced the keys out of him or just beat the keys out of him. There are no jurisdictional issues with this approach. From what I understand this guy isn't very popular in any country, so few countries would care. Even fewer would want to publicly discuss how their sovereignty was violated
6. A random member of the criminal organization had access to most but not all of the keys. He showed up at a US embassy and said "well I did lots of bad stuff. I'd like to disappear now & not at a location named Guantanmo! How about we cut a deal"
My personal bet is on #3. It's effectively impossible for anyone to prove they don't have the keys. The only person who could do that would the defendant, who has no interest in doing so.
I think the most likely is a combo variant of #5 and #6. Maybe the USG (or a cooperating government) got leverage on one of his lieutenants - like lieutenant's adult kid goes to NYC to party for a weekend with friends without telling daddy and despite it being against dad's rules. USG quietly holds the kid under some immigration pretext (much easier these days) and forces the lieutenant to put a USB thumb drive in his boss's 'special' PC.
Alternatively, a probable weak point with most overtly criminal kingpins who accumulate literal billions is they really can't trust anyone around them to not steal it. So the guy probably has to keep the crypto keys to his 'big wad' physically with him on a mobile device or memory stick, maybe protected only by a password short enough he can remember it. In that scenario, the USG just does a 'sneak and peek' and images the device, maybe while the guy is transiting a third country. Then it's just a matter of either using one of the NSA's tier 1 vulns on the mobile device image or deploying the NSA's super-computer farm to crack the 'human-memorable' password. If so, it would have been much smarter for the guy to control access to the 'big wad' with split keys separated on multiple devices - and only keep one required part around his neck. Then neither the 'sneak and peak' nor the 'crowbar to the balls' methods would work.
In any of those scenarios, the very interesting part is it shows the Trump admin and Trump's new FBI head Kash Patel are willing to cross some new lines which haven't been publicly crossed before - like using secret intelligence assets for purely criminal enforcement. Note: I think the USG has done this before but it's been pretty rare and always been in ways that were unseen or otherwise deniable, because the CIA/NSA have been extremely resistant to using their best toys for fear of losing their best toys. I suspect the Trump admin has crushed this resistance. A potentially relevant fact is Kash Patel was previously on the National Security Council during Trump's first term, so he'd be familiar with intel assets. Obviously, in the near-term that's bad news for a handful of major international criminals and in the long-term it may be bad for US intelligence capabilities (as the reasons for CIA/NSA resistance weren't baseless).
they already had the means to get the keys.
Yes, and the other big questions are how they even know about the existence of the bitcoin and then how they were able to demonstrate sufficient probable cause to a judge that A) the bitcoin belongs to the suspect, and B) this bitcoin is the direct proceeds of the charged crimes. Given the extremely unusual circumstances around this seizure, its unprecedented size and the complete lack of details - I suspect something new and interesting has happened here.
Unfortunately, we may never find out unless they manage to arrest the suspect, which seems unlikely. The more interesting scenario might be if the Prince Group files suit challenging the seizure. In that case, the government would not only have to produce evidence proving A and B above, but also that the evidence wasn't obtained illegally (like from secret NSA wiretaps on domestic Cambodian telecoms or targeted covert hacking). Given the circumstances, it's hard to imagine the FBI being able to offer plausible 'parallel construction' to support the legality of the evidence.
Those funds (the Defendant Cryptocurrency) are presently in the custody of the U.S. government.The defendant and his co-conspirators subsequently used some of the criminal proceeds for luxury travel and entertainment and to make extravagant purchases such as watches, yachts, private jets, vacation homes, high-end collectables, and rare artwork, including a Picasso painting purchased through an auction house in New York City.
My guess some of defendants were in New York or around the US. You can be a criminal master mind and also be a complete f*king idiot.
Edit: Wow, people really don't want to know how many Bitcoins were seized :)
I'm proud to say that I was able to acquire about $100 worth of product from the dark web using only what would turn out to be several hundred thousand dollars in bitcoin, so at least mine are still in circulation
On the flip side, when I was packing up our house, I found some old paper wallets that I assumed were empty (from a time when I was doing some experimentation with various scripts). One of them had about $2k in BTC, that I promptly added to our downpayment on our new house.
It's like confiscating a Ferrari and saying you took $5 million of car parts from a drug dealer. Like instead say you confiscate 2 Ferraris with a total market value of $5 Million.
Just as you could not sell 127,271 bitcoins all at once at market value, you could not just sell cocaine worth $1.4 billion but still confiscated drugs, even in large quantities, are reported with end consumer market rates. Nowadays, if a report mentions that is talking about "street value", that is already a big plus in my book.
Ross Ulbricht had more, at over 144,000⁽¹⁾, with additional 51,000 seized from a hacker⁽²⁾.
[1] https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/22/ross-ulbricht-pardon-b...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-h....
If someone stole 22 WobiBobbyBones I wouldn't care. If a WobiBobbyBone was worth a billion dollars, then I'd think that's news.
But then again, so do big Eve Online battles.
Wonder how this whole concept overlays onto LLMs, with a lot more money on the line and a lot less regulation.
In a way it's like with an overfunded startup: when at some point in time the music stops because even the last would-be investor realized that the business will never be profitable, the company collapses. But all those paychecks received for playing with Other People's Money don't magically return.
We thinking user error or crypto is nonsense? On the forum I expect the former.
But then again holding some piece of paper (or a database entry) that says you own some gold that you don't actually have in your possession is equally nonsense that also works until it doesn't.
Drawing the line at possession is arbitrary. Either way your ownership is governed by law, and is only as good as the strength of that law.
What matters is rule of law, not possession. If you have strong rule of law, you have some protection for whatever you own, possessed or not. If you have zero rule of law, you have no protection for any of it.
Having gold on your person in a societal collapse is going to be somewhat better than having a slip of paper that says you own gold (in theory you could barter with it) but neither is going to help you much. When the shit actually hits the fan to that degree, the best thing you can be is heavily armed.
But my personal plan is to just hope the shit never hits the fan to that degree while I'm alive and not really worry about it. Its effectively a singularity event beyond which I don't think there's much point in planning for it as an individual.
With bitcoin you can't even just rely on memory for the keys, you need something physical that can be taken away from you.
Of course, private keys are practically unmemorizable, but you can restore a Bitcoin wallet with your seed phrase.
The point of bitcoin was that it can't be taken off you by the state.
The point of a "pig butchering scam" is that victims are socially engineered into giving their assets (in this case, bitcoin) to someone else.
Clearly should’ve used an offline wallet lol.
tl;dr: Someone cracked these weak entropy wallets 3+ years before anyone else and kept it secret
Whether that was the USG or another entity has yet to be revealed
EDIT and were the keys cracked, or were the passphrases obtained ? It's mentioned elsewhere that he had them written down. Which would be a much easier "hack"
The ruling family in Cambodia is a big part of it, via their ownership in HuiOne (now renamed), which is essentially the clearing house for the 'industry'.
In fact the Thai-Cambodia border conflict is due to this industry, and a breakdown in the relationship between Thai and Cambodian leaders over it, with the wiley cambodian leader yet again provoking the sensitive border issue for political gain.
Cambodia is fully commited to scam centers and Thailand doesn't like that and even reached out to Xi directly for cooperation here. Not even a year later the conflict broke.
Finally, cambodia is not suffering at all and if anything the current dictator has become significantly stronger and the country has been on a huge nationalist rise as the dictators control the scam centers and easily repurpose them for online propaganda.
It's surreal how Cambodians are blindly, even passionately, following the government narrative of evil rapacious Thailand invading innocent peace-loving Cambodia, when there is strong evidence showing it was Cambodia provoking the issue to meddle in Thai politics, but there is such deep-seated pride (on both sides I think) that truth is disregarded.
What is making things worse is rest of the world abandoning Cambodia which justifies scam centers profits as there no other source of income. Cambodia is right next to relatively rich Thailand but has nothing to show - its easy to see how nationalism explodes in such conditions.
Thailand's Thaksin is now in jail and his daughter, basically his avatar, has been removed from government. Mission accomplished.
And to get a sense of how powerful this scam industry is in the country, the latest news is of a young Korean murdered after being kidnapped by a scam gang. Korea has responded forcefully, calling out the danger, yet the Cambodian press is now full of accusations that Korea is defaming Cambodia, that they are just as guilty of human-trafficking Cambodian brides, that some Koreans who were 'rescued' from a scam center don't actually want to go home, that the international press are unfairly treating Cambodia ... you know the story by now.
that they are just as guilty of human-trafficking Cambodian brides, that some Koreans who were 'rescued' from a scam center don't actually want to go home
They don't want to go home because they fear the Chinese criminal gangs would follow them home in South Korea where they were recruited in the first place by Korean-speaking Chinese for debts they accrued while they were held captive. Others also fear they could also be held liable for participating in their fraud -- even if they were forced -- not because they love getting beaten.
Cambodia is claiming they are 'detained' by immigration, and refuse to leave, making it sound like the Koreans themselves are the problem, trying to deflect from the real issue.
The article just says "private keys the defendant had in his possession" does this mean he was holding onto private keys that had no passwords / encryption at all that unlocked $15B?
Or does the government have an alternative way of "seizing" bitcoin? I remember years ago people throwing around conspiracy theories that bitcoin was invented by the NSA / other 3 letter agencies with a backdoor to basically allow easy tracking / seizure of criminal assets.
Im not a conspiracy theorist, but stories like these were the government seems so easy to seize such incredibly large amounts of money so easily seems to suggest some other mechanisms that aren't public.
Chen personally maintained records of the wallet addresses and seed phrases associated with the private keys for each.
So he wrote the passwords down, basically.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...
Of course the more likely explanation is that this was a sophisticated albeit classical hack (infrastructure, social engineering, surveillance, whatever) and the quantum run-up is unrelated retail investor hysteria, but have to consider the possibility the market knows something I don’t. If the government stays far ahead enough of private industry at some point in the coming years (or decades) the USG will break encryption without public disclosure unless quantum resistant algs are put in place before that capability is achieved. Hopefully this more exotic implausibility isn’t the explanation, but entertaining to consider, and history is bizarre enough for it to be true.
The practice is called “pig butchering” because scammers deliberately build up trust and emotionally manipulate victims over an extended period—much like fattening up a pig—before ultimately stealing as much money as possible in a final act of financial “slaughter”
We are seeing similar attempts in other Southeast Asian countries and even Korea but Cambodia seems like an outlier. It's sad that not enough of these subversive influence campaigns by China is being talked about here.
Once again, it is America leading the way and using its vast intelligence and military power to be a de-facto global police. Obviously DOJ acted because of Americans were victimized but in doing so have done what South Korean government failed to do.
Lot of heat and criticisms against South Korean government now and its embassy in Cambodia that have largely acted in negligence, even telling one of the victims to report it to Cambodian police and don't bother them.
At this point its accurate to say the Cambodian leadership have completely been subjugated through corruption and that they are no longer running the country but Chinese OCGs who are affiliated with CCP and that they are probably influencing it at a state level on all matters.
What are some news related to this?
After obtaining the bitcoins, are they forced to sell it immediately? How does this affect the market?
Once they did, however, the marshals fell back on standard procedure, preparing to handle the Bitcoin the same way they would a coke smuggler’s speedboat: by auctioning it off. That posed challenges because of the sheer size of the seizure—about 175,000 Bitcoins, or 2% of all the Bitcoin in circulation at the time. According to a prosecutor familiar with the case, the marshals opted for a staggered series of auctions to avoid crashing Bitcoin’s price. In four auctions between June 2014 and November 2015, the marshals sold the Silk Road Bitcoins for an average price of $379. (https://fortune.com/crypto/2018/02/21/government-forfeiture-...)
There were also some bitcoins seized from a hacker that stole them from Silk Road in 2013, and when they seized it in 2020 it was worth $1B, now it's worth $6.5B. Nice profit for the government. https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/09/federal-government-all...
After obtaining the bitcoins, are they forced to sell it immediately? How does this affect the market?
Other way around, by executive order they're forced to hold it in a sovereign wealth fund.
Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
If they're going to be only prosecuting crimes where there's something in it for them it's going to be a very unsafe society.
Large scam call centers run by Chinese nationals are getting broken up in the region pretty regularly.
In my experience, folks who dabble in crypto and even seasoned users always underestimate how hard and tricky of a problem proper self-custody actually is.
And when they do think about it, it's always too late.
And by the way, multi-sig is not the only thing you want to be thinking about.
Cold walletting is another that most people miss.
Also, avoiding concentrating a large number of coins on a small number of addresses (not that I know this was done in the cast of this scam) is another thing most people miss when in fact this was from day one listed as bad practice by IIRC Satoshi himself.
And finally, to mention the standard counter-argument to self-custody: the $5 pipe wrench attack only works if the attackers know the coins exist.
For those interested in plumbing the depth of the problem, the glacier protocol is a good place to start:
[0] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/starlink--an-internet-l...
if they have the capability
They absolutely do: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...
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.
Gentle reminder that the presence of a strong democratic regime with law and no bribes keeps the world a better place.
Once the US becomes corrupted at this scale we are doomed to this bullshit.
I'm not sure how you can pull out of it without jailing a significant fraction of the Republican party (and quite a few elderly Democrats). Plenty of people around Trump got jailed and that didn't make a difference.
$15B of real wealth is a large amount even for a powerful family, so I am surprised it's not a headline news in global media.
Chen personally maintained records of the wallet addresses and seed phrases associated with the private keys for each.
So it sounds like they have the seed phrases and thus the private keys.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...
If not, why wouldn't he just transfer the funds to a new seed?
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...
The actual taking of the bitcoin is merely taking custody of the bitcoin. The forfeiture process changes the actual _ownership_. Think in terms of when the feds take cash from a car. FIRST they actually take the cash THEN LATER they file the forfeiture.
U.S. Sanctions Cambodian Conglomerate, Citing Role in 'Pig-Butchering' Scams
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chairman-prince-group-indicte...