HN Reader

Seems organised crime is taking advantage of less-policed (or lawless) regions in Cambodia and Burma.

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...

For the German HN readers, there’s a really good podcast with some investigative journalism about this exact topic made by the public broadcast services: https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/urn:ard:episode:305aa362...

I don’t believe there’s an English translation sadly, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

Sounds like good news but the press release doesn't detail how the FBI managed to trace, positively identify and then seize such a huge pile of crypto ($15B) from a suspect they say took extensive steps to launder and hide the source and ownership of the crypto. I'm curious because this guy is clearly very experienced, highly sophisticated and located in a country where the government and law enforcement are obviously tacitly protecting him.

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.

Long overdue. At some point, these scam operations are so large that they have to be operating with tacit approval of their host countries, who have been given no incentive to stop the virtual cold war against the personal finances of foreign citizenry that is bringing in millions of dollars into their economy.

The human cost of these industrialised pig butchering scam compounds in southeast Asia is staggering. Hundreds of thousands of people forced to work in indentured- or slave-labour conditions, running these scams on people in other countries. There's an enormous toll at both ends of the practice. Life in jail is far too good for the criminals running these places.

Is it actually usable, sellable Bitcoin worth $15B? Or is it some kind of storage that the owner couldn't really use easily for some reason?

$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.

I had never heard of "pig butchering".

> 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”

I'm curious how the Bitcoin was actually seized, given that the indictment says the perp is still at large and held the Bitcoin in self custodied wallets.

Glad they got somewhere with that. It's a bit shocking some of the stuff that goes on out there.

Does this go towards the White House ballroom with a few coins tossed to the ring kissers? For real, what happens to this $15 billion?

Do they force you to reveal your private keys?

After obtaining the bitcoins, are they forced to sell it immediately? How does this affect the market?

From this article they got $15B (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/bitcoin-doj-chen-zhi-pig-but...). At what point do you say, "That's enough money?" Did they think the scam was going to go on forever?

DOJ press release.[1] DOJ claims custody of US$15 billion in Bitcoin. "Largest forfeiture action in the history of the Department of Justice."

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chairman-prince-group-indicte...

So apparently the FBI or other US agency hacked this guy and drained his wallets? No indication he’s been arrested, wallets said to be unhosted.

Clearly should’ve used an offline wallet lol.

It took 10 years for Madoff victims to get most of their money back and he was literally just depositing the money into his checking account. He also almost certainly had much fewer victims than this guy did. Based on the complaint I think there may be a large number of international victims as well. This case will really test whatever claims process the DOJ has but hopefully some measure of compensation can be reached quickly. I suspect there are tens of thousands of scam domains and different addresses used so even identifying who to notify will probably be extremely difficult.

How can you scam 15B and not be smart enough to make your btc unaccessible ?

Would these money be returned to the victims?

If DOJ knows the destination wallets can they trace the transactions ...

into the wallets back to the victims?

from the wallets forward to the others working with the scammer?

Wow, maybe we should use this to pay our ATC

The DOJ article is far more informative than the CNBC article. Chen Zhi, the alleged perpetrator, remains at large.

Since in pig butchering scams the victims often do not go to the police or tell anyone due to feelings of shame, we can assume quite a big pot of that money will go into the US federal crypto reserve.

I would love to see a new take on "James Bond" (or similar franchise? new franchise?) — one that is realistic and instead sees our spy move through these modern domains of illegal money instead of battling the clichéd Cold War villains with their Persian cats.

I don't understand how he was savvy and organized enough to operate such a massive operation and yet didn't manage to secure his $15 billion crypto wallet... Amazing.

$15B is a mind-blowing amount. I came here just to make sure it wasn't an M to B typo.

This sounds very much like the operation described in the book Number Go Up, which is ostensibly about FTX, but is really about a number of crypto operations which may or may not be illegal

Just curious, how will you sieze bitcoin?

> 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.

15b is an insurmountable in poor Cambodia

So, who gets the money? Surely this criminal enterprise had victims from multiple nations, not just the US.

I am shocked that the organizer of a large scam call center in SEAsia is a Chinese national.

Large scam call centers run by Chinese nationals are getting broken up in the region pretty regularly.

Related:

U.S. Sanctions Cambodian Conglomerate, Citing Role in 'Pig-Butchering' Scams

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584418

legendary shiny DoJ w

Wonder if Musk will be protesting, those seizures could put a dent in SpaceX earnings https://www.barrons.com/news/myanmar-scam-cities-booming-des...

It's 127,271 Bitcoins. Interesting choice not to mention the number of Bitcoins but use its current market value in USD. I feel like this says something about Bitcoin but not sure what exactly.

Edit: Wow, people really don't want to know how many Bitcoins were seized :)

Criminal podcast shared the story of one of the forced workers at scamming camp in Myanmar: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-332-the-compound-9-12-202...

Btw this is low-key the reason why Cambodia almost went to war with Thailand recently. In particular what's interesting is that how quickly Cambodia repurposed scam center employees as internet trolls. They're onto a really powerful golden goose here that not only brings in 15B usd but also empowers the current dictatorship. But also it's a pit of doom that is destined to erupt anytime now.

With the recent insane moves in quantum stocks almost makes me wonder if there’s a possibility the NSA or other USG agency is far enough ahead of publicly known capabilities in quantum computing to brute force private keys/break encryption and this info is leaking into markets.

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.

And this isn't the only one.

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.

The point of bitcoin was that it can't be taken off you by the state. So either this was severe user error, to the tune of why aren't the keys somewhere secure when there's a billion dollars behind them, or the nominal reason for bitcoin existing is nonsense.

We thinking user error or crypto is nonsense? On the forum I expect the former.

Looks like the US is getting a "national Bitcoin reserve" without even trying.

Wow. $15 billion is an astronomical, nearly unfathomable amount of money in Cambodia. This must have been a huge operation. It's almost 1/3 of the country's entire GDP!

Well done DOJ. Hopefully the victims get their money back.

It boggles my mind that people like this don't set up multi-sig wallets using hardware devices that are physically not in the same location.

So in these cases of government seizing bitcoin, the people they seize from have unencrypted private keys?

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.

Who they were scamming, Americans? How they managed to gain trust, even considering strong accent or grammatical mistakes. How do they identify and trace these Chinese fraudsters? They all look the same and have a name like Hi Lo. Where the money go... of course real estate.

I wish there is a way for the scam victims to claim some money back. That would be awesome.

how does one seize bitcoins? presumably he left them on an exchange? not your keys, not your crypto.

wonder what they’ll spend it on