DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia
70 comments
·October 14, 2025Reason077
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.
Wingman4l7
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.
PaywallBuster
Direct link to the indictment https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/chairman-prince-group-i...
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
yhager
> 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?
PaywallBuster
It's a small / under developed country
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...
vintermann
It's not hard to believe that a small country can have a vastly oversized economy due to finance - legal or illegal.
shkkmo
The amount of bitcoin siezed here is about 30% of the Cambodia GDP...
JumpCrisscross
> 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.
bobthepanda
Interestingly enough, China is thought to have leaned on the scales in Myanmar’s civil conflict due to pig-butchering there. (Not only were they scamming Chinese, they were also human trafficking them to operate the scams.)
alephnerd
China only began executing those pig-butcherers when the EAO that was providing protection to Chinese pig-butchering gangs in that region of Myanmar (Kachin Independence Army) re-flipped towards India recently [0] and had begun to ignore China [1] and rerouting rare earths and other goods to India [2]
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...
nicechianti
[dead]
greenchair
that's a pretty naive view of war. we are at war with many countries all the time, most of it is cold.
JumpCrisscross
> 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.
_carbyau_
I this similar concept, differently.
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.
Animats
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...
andruby
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”
decimalenough
It's a direct translation of the Chinese 杀猪.
vintermann
And it's a bad expression, because it's the scammers own smug term of contempt, and makes victims less likely to come forward/warn each other thanks to the shame.
kenjackson
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?
mothballed
I'm not sure if one can merely walk away from a criminal enterprise of that size. As soon as you stop paying certain people you end up in a cage, and unless the stream of money is constant there is no reason to just not reneg on all prior agreements and go in a cage for stuff you already paid authorities off for.
JumpCrisscross
> As soon as you stop paying certain people you end up in a cage
You end up dead because your co-conspirators don't want to end up in a cage.
dgfitz
So the whole crypto anonymity thing isn’t actually real? As it turns out, tracing people is still easier than tracing money? Decentralized economies are run by criminal enterprises?! We aren’t safe!?!
Wonder how this whole concept overlays onto LLMs, with a lot more money on the line and a lot less regulation.
wmf
You're probably joking, but even if crypto was totally anonymous, running a massive criminal human trafficking empire in the real world is very non-anonymous.
dotnet00
Crypto anonymity is still possible if you don't plan to spend your ill-gotten millions or billions particularly quickly. But, of course, you don't get to having a massive active criminal empire that way.
verteu
At that scale, you have massive influence within the Cambodian government, so you're not worried about "getting caught" in the traditional sense.
apnsngr
These scams have enormous scale. The Economist has a fascinating podcast about it. The full series requires a subscription, but it is worth at least listening to the first 3 free episodes. https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc
yieldcrv
They have shareholders who bought the shares for more than the company annual revenue and expect infinite potential of profits to justify the price they paid
al_borland
Had they thought $1B was enough they would have missed out on $14B.
skylurk
I think the implication is they could have stayed under the radar and still have that $1B.
chistev
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?
oskarkk
Bitcoin market cap is $2.2T, so $15B of that is 0.7% of all bitcoins. They aren't selling them on open market, but in an auction (or a couple of auctions). It may not have an immediate influence on the bitcoin price, unless the buyer sells them right away. When someone sells an amount that big, it's done over a long period of time, to not crash the market (you'd probably get significantly less money if you sold it fast).
> 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...
me_again
As I understand it, they persuade their marks to transfer bitcoin to accounts they control.
walletdrainer
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.
0xOsprey
Taylor is on to something here: https://x.com/tayvano_/status/1978273602719158448
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
adamors
Please use xcancel: https://xcancel.com/tayvano_/status/1978273602719158448 when linking to X since a lot of us don't have accounts or just don't want to log in.
yellow_lead
It may not be a hack, but a warrant like 'Hey Google, give us access to this guy's Gmail.'
null
advisedwang
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...
e40
Scam, Inc from The Economist is worth the subscription for 1 month. Very in depth.
mrandish
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.
lotsofpulp
I am also curious how the US government obtained possession of the bitcoin if the defendant is still at large. Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of bitcoin?
sidewndr46
According to Ars Technica: "Adding further mystery, it’s unknown how federal officials managed to obtain the cryptographic keys required to seize the funds from Zhi."
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.
lotsofpulp
Allowing them to do what? The feds are saying they already have the keys, so either they are lying, or they already had the means to get the keys. Which would be the juicy part of the story.
_cs2017_
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.
advisedwang
The forfeiture complaint [1] says:
> 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...
blueprint
is Chen in custody?
If not, why wouldn't he just transfer the funds to a new seed?
jacknews
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.
decimalenough
No, it was a "Russia invading Ukraine" sized miscalculation. The "wily" Cambodian leader's military got their asses handed to them by the Thai army, and Cambodia is suffering a lot more from the still ongoing border closure than Thailand is. Remittances, tourism, trade, you name it, it's all in the doldrums. (Good time to visit Angkor Wat if you can swing it, though.)
tim333
Glad they got somewhere with that. It's a bit shocking some of the stuff that goes on out there.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chairman-prince-group-indicte...