The Butcher’s Ledger. Inside the industrial machinery of pig butchering romance fraud – where lives were stolen, billions were made, and nothing was left to chance
Chen Zhi didn’t stumble into empire-building. When he founded Prince Holding Group in Cambodia in 2015, he presented himself as a visionary – a developer, a financier, a Renaissance man of Asian capitalism. His company boasted dozens of offices across more than thirty countries. It also had something the official presentations didn’t advertise: a network of compounds scattered throughout Cambodia where, behind high walls and coiled razor wire, thousands of people performed the most profitable work of the twenty-first century – the systematic robbery of strangers via smartphone.
The documents that landed in federal court in New York this past October reveal not just the scale of this operation – more than a hundred and twenty-seven thousand bitcoins, billions in losses – but the precision with which it was engineered. This isn’t a story of chaos and improvisation. It’s a study in social engineering and operations management, where every element was considered, tested, and optimized. Pig butchering – the term comes from the Chinese sha zhu pan, literally “pig-slaughtering board” – isn’t a casual metaphor. It’s a way of thinking about victims: first you fatten them, then you kill them.
The Infrastructure of Deceit
Chen didn’t build his compounds as covert operations. On the contrary – he erected them as legitimate businesses. The Jinhong Park complex in Kampong Speu Province was officially a technology park. Golden Fortune in Chrey Thom was meant to be a startup incubator. The Jinbei Compound in Sihanoukville operated next door to a hotel and casino belonging to Prince Group. All these places shared certain features: high walls, security checkpoints, dormitory barracks, and thousands of people who’d arrived with promises of work in call centers or customer service. Most discovered quickly that they couldn’t leave.
Chen kept detailed records. In the case files there’s a ledger – barely credible in its fastidiousness – that catalogued which floor of which building at Jinhong Park was running which precise scam. “Vietnamese Order Fraud” – Building A, Floor 2001. “Russian Order Fraud” – Building B, Floor 3004. “Euro-American jingliao” – scripted chat, choreographed conversation – Building B, Floor 2001. “Chinese Brush Order” – a scheme involving fake product reviews – Building B, Floor 3005. Each operation had its location, its team, its metrics.
This wasn’t intuitive management. Chen and his people ran a factory. Every element was measured, every result recorded. The documents describe “phone farms” – automated call systems – consisting of shelves filled with thousands of devices, remotely controlled, managing tens of thousands of accounts across popular social-media platforms. One such farm, according to Chen’s notes, controlled seventy-six thousand social-media profiles using twelve hundred and fifty devices. This was industrial infrastructure, designed for mass scale.
Crucially, Chen didn’t merely oversee the construction of these facilities – he was deeply involved in their operational details. When, in 2018, one of his closest associates – call him Co-Conspirator-1, as he appears in the documents – purchased millions of stolen phone numbers and passwords on the black market, he did so with Chen’s knowledge. When another associate, Co-Conspirator-3, supervised the construction of Golden Fortune in 2019, he reported directly to Chen. This wasn’t a middleman. This was an operator who personally reviewed financial schemes, monitored money flows, and even intervened when something went awry.
The Choreography of Fraud
Pig butchering is complicated not because it requires advanced technology. It’s complicated because it requires time. And patience. This isn’t phishing, where you send millions of e-mails hoping someone will click. This isn’t ransomware, where you lock up data and demand payment. Pig butchering is a long game – sometimes lasting weeks, sometimes months – in which the scammer builds something with the victim that looks and feels like a relationship.
The script is always the same. Phase one: cold contact. The scammer messages a stranger on WhatsApp, Telegram, or another platform. Usually, they pretend to have the wrong number. “Hey, is this Michael? We met at that conference last week.” The victim responds: “No, I think you have the wrong person.” But the scammer doesn’t give up. “Oh, I’m so sorry! But since we’re talking, what do you do for work?” It sounds innocent. That’s why it works.
Phase two: building trust. The scammer doesn’t move straight to business. First, they talk about life. They ask about hobbies, about family, about weekend plans. They send photos – never their own, always stolen from someone else’s profile, carefully selected to avoid being “too beautiful,” as Prince Group’s internal documents instructed, because excessively attractive faces arouse suspicion. They create an illusion of spontaneity. They respond at different times of day, as if they actually had their own life. Sometimes they deliberately delay responses, to seem busy. It’s all scripted. In the case files, the term jingliao appears – “scripted chat” – pre-written conversation templates, with variations for different victim responses.
Phase three: the investment introduction. After several weeks, once trust has been established, the scammer mentions casually that they’ve recently started investing in cryptocurrency. They don’t push. They don’t try to sell. They just share their “success.” “I invested five hundred dollars and after a week I had eight hundred. It’s amazing how this works.” The victim becomes interested. The scammer sends screenshots – fake, obviously, but convincing – showing growing profits. “If you want, I can introduce you. My cousin runs a platform, it’s very secure.”
And here the actual slaughter begins. The victim registers on the platform – which looks like a real cryptocurrency exchange but is actually controlled by the scammers – and makes their first transfer. Let’s say, five hundred dollars. The platform shows the investment value rising. After a few days, the victim sees six hundred and fifty dollars on their screen. They try to withdraw – and they get the money. This is the crucial moment. This makes the victim believe everything is legitimate.
So they invest more. Two thousand dollars. Then five thousand. Then twenty thousand. The scammer keeps supporting them, congratulating them, encouraging them. “See? I told you! Now that you’ve got momentum, you should really increase your stake.” The platform shows ever-larger profits – thirty thousand, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand. The victim feels like an investment genius. Until they try to withdraw a larger sum.
And then the platform starts imposing conditions. “You need to pay taxes on your gains.” “You need to pay a transaction fee.” “Your account has been frozen due to suspicious activity – you need to deposit security funds to unlock it.” The victim pays. Nothing happens. They try to contact the scammer. No response. They try to log into the platform. The site has stopped working. The money is gone.
The Brooklyn Network
Prince Group didn’t operate alone. It had networks of collaborators around the world, local operators who ran scams on its behalf. One of the most lucrative operated in New York – specifically in Brooklyn and Queens. This network, which the case files call the “Brooklyn Network,” serviced victims throughout the United States, funneling money into the accounts of shell companies registered in New York.
Victims, convinced by “introducers” – people who’d made contact with them and built trust – were directed to “account managers,” who instructed them which bank accounts to wire their “investments” to. The victims thought they were depositing funds into brokerage accounts or cryptocurrency exchanges. In reality, they were wiring money to shell companies – corporate phantoms that existed only on paper – run by the Brooklyn Network.
The money vanished immediately from these accounts – transferred onward, converted to cryptocurrency, broken into hundreds of smaller transactions to complicate tracking. Some went back to Cambodia, to Jinbei Compound, where the scammers had originally conducted conversations with victims. The rest circulated through additional layers of accounts until it finally reached Chen and his people.
In just fifteen months – from May, 2021, to August, 2022 – the Brooklyn Network defrauded more than two hundred and fifty victims of over eighteen million dollars. That sounds like a lot. But in the context of Chen’s entire empire, this was just one operation in one city. Prince Group ran dozens of such networks, on every continent, in dozens of languages.
Significantly, Chen personally monitored some of these operations. The case files include an example of Victim-1, a person in California who, in the summer of 2021, transferred more than four hundred thousand dollars in cryptocurrency to the scammers. These funds, through a series of intermediary addresses, ultimately arrived at a wallet whose address Chen had recorded in his private notes. This wasn’t accidental. Chen tracked large sums personally.
The Economics of Violence
Chen’s empire didn’t hold together just through technology and logistics. It held together through violence. And corruption.
Prince Group paid bribes to officials in multiple countries – in Cambodia, in China, in other parts of Asia. Chen kept meticulous records of these payments. One document, preserved by investigators, tracks hundreds of millions of dollars spent on “gifts” for politicians and security officials. In 2019, Co-Conspirator-2 – one of Chen’s closest people – bought a yacht worth more than three million dollars for a high-ranking foreign official. Chen personally delivered watches worth millions to another “senior foreign official” (as the court documents identify him), who then helped him obtain a diplomatic passport. Chen used this passport to visit the United States in April, 2023 – a country whose citizens his organization was robbing on a massive scale.
The bribes served specific purposes. They bought early warnings about police raids. They bought protection from arrests. They bought silence. One document describes a conversation between Co-Conspirator-2 and an official from China’s Ministry of Public Security (M.P.S.), who promised to “pull Prince Group out of trouble.” In exchange, Co-Conspirator-2 offered to “take care of” the official’s son.
But corruption was only half the equation. The other half was fear. Prince Group used violence systematically – not as a last resort but as part of normal operational management. Workers who tried to escape from the compounds were caught and beaten. Chen personally instructed how to do this. In one conversation recorded by investigators, Chen tells his associate about someone who was “causing trouble” at one of the compounds: “You can beat him, but don’t kill him. And make sure he doesn’t escape.”
The case files contain photographs. One shows a young man with a bloodied face, holding a phone to his head – as if trying to photograph his own injuries. Another shows a group of dozens of people kneeling on the ground, at night, surrounded by armed guards. These images weren’t secret. Chen kept them. Not as trophies, but as documentation. As proof that the system worked.
Industrial-Scale Money Laundering
Over the years, Chen and his people built one of the most sophisticated money-laundering systems in the world. Not because it was technologically complex – on the contrary, at its core it was banally simple. But it was effective, because it was comprehensive. It exploited every available loophole, every platform, every border.
The basic mechanism worked like this: money stolen from victims – usually in the form of bank transfers or deposits to fake cryptocurrency exchanges – was immediately converted to bitcoin or stablecoins like U.S.D.T. (tether), whose value was pegged to the dollar. These digital assets then passed through a labyrinth of transactions. First to cryptocurrency exchanges – particularly those that didn’t coöperate with American law enforcement, like Exchange-1 in China. Then to “professional laundries” – firms that specialized in obscuring the origins of cryptocurrency, breaking it into thousands of smaller transactions and running it through hundreds of intermediary wallets. Next, back to cash – purchased at exchange offices, often on the black market. And finally, invested in “clean” assets: real estate, luxury goods, businesses. But Chen went a step further. He didn’t just use external laundries – he created his own, embedded within Prince Group’s legitimate operations.
The first method: cryptocurrency mining. Chen controlled several bitcoin-mining farms – in Laos (Warp Data), in Texas (a Warp Data subsidiary), and in China (Lubian, at one point the sixth-largest player in the world). Mining bitcoin is legal. Newly mined bitcoins are “clean” – they have no history, no connection to any criminality. Chen exploited this, systematically mixing “dirty” bitcoins stolen from victims with “clean” bitcoins freshly mined. The F.B.I. discovered that wallets associated with Lubian were funded with new bitcoins only thirty per cent of the time – the rest came from external sources, which is highly atypical for a legitimate mining operation. Chen wasn’t really running a mining business. He was running a laundry that produced bitcoins as a byproduct.
The second method: online gambling. Prince Group operated an extensive network of gambling platforms, operating illegally in many countries, including Cambodia, where online gambling was banned around 2020. Chen circumvented these prohibitions by launching “mirror sites” – copies of the same site on different domains and servers, which disappeared and reappeared depending on law-enforcement pressure. Gambling was an ideal laundering tool: money flows in as “bets,” circulates through the system, and flows out as “winnings.” Who’s going to verify whether someone actually played, or just transferred funds?
Crucially, Chen didn’t hide this from his own people. Co-Conspirator-1, one of his closest associates, maintained payroll records for the gambling-platform employees. In these records – covering 2018 to 2024 – there was a note: “Employee salaries – please use clean money for payments.” Even in internal documents, Chen distinguished between “dirty” and “clean” funds. He knew exactly what he was doing.
The third method: shell companies. Dozens of corporate phantoms, registered in tax havens – the Caymans, the British Virgin Islands, Hong Kong, Singapore – managed by nominee directors, with false declarations regarding income sources. One such company, Future Technology Investment (F.T.I.), when opening an account at an American bank, listed its income source as “personal wealth.” In reality, its income came from cryptocurrency mines financed with money stolen from victims. Another firm, Amber Hill Ventures, similarly understated its anticipated transactions when opening an account, estimating them at around two million dollars per month. In reality, in February, 2020, its account recorded inflows of twenty-two and a half million dollars and outflows of twenty-one point eight million. The scale of operations was thousands of times larger than the documents suggested.
These companies conducted no actual business. They existed only as nodes in the money-flow network. Funds flowed into their accounts, dispersed to other accounts, mixed with other funds, were converted to different currencies, and then disappeared into the next layer of the system.
The F.B.I., tracing these transactions, discovered something even more elaborate: techniques called “spraying” and “funneling.” In “spraying,” a large sum of cryptocurrency was divided into hundreds or thousands of smaller transactions, scattered across many wallets to complicate tracking. In “funneling,” these dispersed funds were collected back into one wallet. Chen used these techniques repeatedly, in multiple layers, creating tree-like structures – where one sum branched into dozens of addresses, which then merged into one, which branched again. The F.B.I. documented a case where funds from one cryptocurrency exchange were divided into twenty-seven transactions, transferred to twenty-seven different wallets, then recombined in one intermediary wallet, after which they were divided again and ultimately flowed into wallets controlled by Chen.
Moreover, in some cases the timing of these transactions was nearly identical to the timing of other transactions from completely different sources. For example: bitcoins mined by Lubian were sent to wallet X at specific times and in specific amounts. Simultaneously, bitcoins from Exchange-2 – a cryptocurrency exchange where Chen was laundering other funds – were sent to the same wallet X, at the same moment, in nearly identical amounts. This wasn’t coincidence. This was deliberate strategy: making “dirty” money look like part of the stream of “clean” money from mining.
Chen monitored these operations personally. The F.B.I. found in his private notes diagrams representing transaction structures – charts showing how money flowed from one wallet to another, through mining farms, through exchanges, through shell companies. One such diagram, handwritten by Chen, traced the flow of bitcoins from a mining farm through a dozen intermediary wallets to his own final wallet. Chen wasn’t a passive beneficiary of these schemes. He was their architect.
127,271 bitcoins
By 2020, Chen had amassed a fortune so large it became almost abstract. About a hundred and twenty-seven thousand bitcoins, stored in twenty-five wallets whose private keys Chen personally controlled. He wrote them down – along with the seed phrases, the recovery codes that allowed restoration of wallet access – in his own documents. These bitcoins, depending on the exchange rate, were worth anywhere from several to more than ten billion dollars. For comparison: internal Prince Group documents suggested that the total legitimate revenues of all companies belonging to the conglomerate didn’t exceed a few hundred million dollars annually. Some key companies even had negative cash flow. Chen’s money didn’t come from business. It came from crime.
The F.B.I. conducted a meticulous blockchain analysis, tracing the origins of these bitcoins. They discovered that the bitcoins Chen had accumulated came from two main sources: from cryptocurrency mining and from cryptocurrency exchanges – particularly Exchange-1 and Exchange-2 – where Chen and his associates stored processed funds.
But most importantly, the F.B.I. discovered a direct connection between these bitcoins and specific victims. One example: in the summer of 2021, a person in California, designated in the documents as Victim-1, transferred more than four hundred thousand dollars in cryptocurrency to an address controlled by scammers. These funds passed through several intermediary wallets and ultimately arrived at a wallet whose address began with “0x77” – and which Chen personally monitored, according to his own notes. This wasn’t an anonymous transaction somewhere in the system. This was money stolen from a specific person, which went directly to a wallet controlled by the head of a criminal organization.
Chen’s wallets weren’t chaotic. The F.B.I. discovered that they could be grouped into thirteen “clusters” – groups of wallets that were funded in similar ways. Some clusters were almost entirely supplied with new bitcoins from mining. Others were supplied mainly by transfers from Exchange-1. Still others from Exchange-2. Chen managed his wallets like investment portfolios, separating funds according to their source and laundering method.
The Fall
On October 14, 2025, federal prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment against Chen. They charged him with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. That same day, the U.S. Treasury Department added Prince Group, Chen, and dozens of his associates and companies to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list – meaning a freeze on all their assets subject to American jurisdiction and a prohibition on any transactions with them by U.S. citizens.
How did this operation, which had functioned for a decade, which had stolen billions, which had paid off hundreds of officials, finally get broken? The answer is prosaic: Chen made a mistake. Not a technological one. Not an operational one. An emotional one.
In 2023, Chen visited the United States using a diplomatic passport obtained through bribes. He travelled openly, didn’t hide. He felt secure. And perhaps he was – if not for the fact that American investigators were already watching him. The Brooklyn Network had been dismantled in 2022. The F.B.I. began tracing money flows back to Cambodia, to Jinbei Compound, to other Prince Group facilities. Every transaction left a trace on the blockchain. Every wallet had an address. Every address could be linked to other addresses. It was only a matter of time.
Interestingly, Chen didn’t try to hide his wealth. On the contrary – he spent it ostentatiously. Yachts, watches, private jets, vacation homes, works of art. In 2024, through a New York auction house, he purchased a Picasso. This wasn’t a minor purchase. This was the gesture of a man who believed he was untouchable.
When the indictment was unsealed on October 14, 2025, Chen was outside the United States. He wasn’t arrested. What about his fortune – those hundred and twenty-seven thousand bitcoins?
Here the story becomes less triumphant. Court documents claim that the cryptocurrencies are “currently in the possession of the United States” and are located “at cryptocurrency addresses known to the government.” But the language is careful, deliberately ambiguous. There’s no mention of exactly how the F.B.I. would have obtained Chen’s private keys – those digital passwords without which bitcoins are unreachable, regardless of how many court orders you issue.
The F.B.I. knows the wallet addresses. It monitors them in real time, waiting for the moment when Chen tries to move those funds. But actually possessing the bitcoins? That’s another matter. Without the private keys – which Chen could have stored on an encrypted drive, in a safe somewhere in Asia, or simply in his memory – those bitcoins might as well be unreachable. The blockchain is transparent: anyone can see how many bitcoins are at a given address. But no one can move them without the key.
Chen has not been captured to this day. His empire has been dismantled – without access to financial institutions, without a network of collaborators, without the ability to legally conduct business. But did he lose everything? That’s not certain. If somewhere, in an encrypted file or on a piece of paper hidden in a safe, there are seed phrases – those dozen or so words that allow reconstruction of private keys – then Chen still controls one of the largest criminal fortunes in history. That fortune is only temporarily unreachable, frozen not by technology but by caution. All it takes is for him to try to move it someday. And then the F.B.I. will be waiting.
Or he won’t try. Or he can’t. Or the keys disappeared with someone who’s no longer alive. In the world of cryptocurrency, such things happen. Billions of dollars vanish forever because someone forgot a password, lost a drive, or died without giving anyone access. Maybe Chen is now the richest man who can’t spend a cent. Or maybe the F.B.I. actually seized everything, but isn’t talking about it because it doesn’t want to reveal its methods.
Either way, one thing is certain: those hundred and twenty-seven thousand bitcoins remain the most expensive unsolved mystery of this case.
What Remains
The story of Chen Zhi isn’t exceptional. It’s typical. Pig butchering is currently one of the most lucrative forms of crime in the world. According to estimates by human-rights organizations, in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar (Burma) alone, approximately three hundred and fifty thousand people are currently employed in scam compounds – facilities like those Chen ran. Annual revenues from these operations are estimated at fifty to seventy-five billion dollars.
In Cambodia, this industry has become a dominant economic force. It’s estimated to generate twelve and a half to nineteen billion dollars annually – more than any other sector in the country. This isn’t the margin of the economy. This is its center.
Why does it work? Because it’s simple. Because it exploits fundamental features of human psychology: the desire for profit, the need for connection, susceptibility to manipulation. Every one of us wants to believe that someone cares about us. Every one of us wants to believe there’s a chance for easy money. Pig butchering doesn’t deceive people because it’s technologically sophisticated. It deceives people because it’s emotionally sophisticated.
And it will continue to work as long as three things exist: the Internet, cryptocurrency, and corrupt officials. The first two are integral parts of the contemporary world. The third is, too.
The story of Chen Zhi shows something else as well: that twenty-first-century organized crime doesn’t look like the mafias in movies. It doesn’t need guns, dark alleys, or secret meetings. It needs smartphones, servers, and bank accounts. It needs people who can write convincing messages. It needs logistics, management, reports. This isn’t a romantic tale of gangsters. It’s the story of a criminal corporation that employed thousands of people, kept meticulous books, and optimized processes like any other firm.
The only difference: this company made money by destroying other people’s lives. And for a long time, no one stopped it. Because it paid the right people. Because it operated in places where no one was looking. Because it exploited the gap between technology and law – a gap that remains wide.
Chen was eventually caught. But there are hundreds, maybe thousands like him, still operating. Still building compounds. Still running phone farms. Still writing to strangers: “Hey, is this Michael?” And someone answers.
Founder and Managing Partner of Skarbiec Law Firm, recognized by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna as one of the best tax advisory firms in Poland (2023, 2024). Legal advisor with 19 years of experience, serving Forbes-listed entrepreneurs and innovative start-ups. One of the most frequently quoted experts on commercial and tax law in the Polish media, regularly publishing in Rzeczpospolita, Gazeta Wyborcza, and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Author of the publication “AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto. Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator” and co-author of the award-winning book “Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy” (Security of a Modern Company). LinkedIn profile: 18 500 followers, 4 million views per year. Awards: 4-time winner of the European Medal, Golden Statuette of the Polish Business Leader, title of “International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.” He specializes in strategic legal consulting, tax planning, and crisis management for business.
