U.S. Prosecutors Still Hold 127,271 Bitcoin From Chen Zhi While China Keeps the Prince Group Chairman From Answering Brooklyn
The largest forfeiture in Justice Department history is still a pile of 127,271 Bitcoin, and the man prosecutors say held the keys still cannot swear an answer. When the civil complaint landed in Brooklyn on October 14, 2025, the stash in 25 unhosted wallets was priced near $15 billion. Chen Zhi, founder and chairman of Cambodia’s Prince Holding Group, was charged in the Eastern District of New York with wire-fraud conspiracy and money-laundering conspiracy over forced-labor scam compounds that ran industrial “pig butchering” fraud. On January 6, 2026, he was taken in Cambodia. Chinese state television showed him on a plane, and his American lawyers later described him hooded and manacled. The coins stayed in U.S. custody. Beijing’s public line was that Washington had hacked a Chinese national’s Bitcoin. Washington’s line is a forfeiture of fraud proceeds. The verbs share a wallet list and do not share a courthouse.
By the summer of 2026 the fight had moved from the press release to a narrower and uglier question. Who has standing to claim the coins when the claimant is incommunicado in China? The AEGIS Alliance covers the file as a three-capital problem that has not become a victim’s check. Cambodia hosted the compounds. The United States holds the Bitcoin and the indictment. China holds the body. None of the three has produced a courtroom result that pays the people who were drained.
What the complaint says the coins were hiding
Eastern District prosecutors describe warehouse-scale fraud sites across Cambodia where people were lured with fake jobs, had their passports taken, and were beaten when quotas slipped. The product was a stranger on a messaging app who steered a target into a fake trading platform. The Justice Department release called the forfeiture the largest in department history. Treasury, with the United Kingdom, sanctioned 146 people and entities around Prince Group. FinCEN used Patriot Act Section 311 tools against Huione Group as a primary money-laundering concern. The complaint says Chen personally held the private keys and kept diagrams of how some of the cryptocurrency was washed, including through “illegal money shops,” and that proceeds were pushed through mining operations such as Laos-based Warp Data and the Chinese company Lubian so the wallets would look like they had been earned by machines.
That mining story is why the dormancy matters. Analysts mapped the cluster to a December 2020 movement that some desks still describe as one of the largest Bitcoin transfers on record, after which the coins largely sat still. A silent pile is easy to seize and easy to argue about. China can say the keys were stolen because it does not control them. The United States can say the keys were taken because the complaint says they were instruments of a trafficking enterprise. A seizure that uses private keys looks like a hack to the capital that lost the man. It looks like police work to the capital that filed the complaint. Prince Group has denied the allegations and called them baseless. Chen has not been convicted in Brooklyn. He also has not been produced there.
A claim filed, then a hood
Chen and Prince Group filed claims in the forfeiture case on December 29, 2025, with Chen verifying both. Within days he was gone. Counsel at Boies Schiller Flexner told the Brooklyn court that Cambodia had privately told him he could not leave, then revoked his citizenship, then delivered him to China. The Chinese Ministry of State Security said he had been placed under “compulsory measures” and warned associates to surrender. “Coercive measures” is not an extradition to the Eastern District of New York. It is an absorption into a system that does not publish docket numbers for a retiree in Ohio.
On June 26, 2026, prosecutors asked Magistrate Judge Clay H. Kaminsky to compel Chen and Prince Group to answer special interrogatories served February 6. The government said Chen had not given signed and sworn responses, and that counsel had instead offered affidavits from third parties speculating about what he might have said. The letter, in United States v. Approximately 127,271 Bitcoin, civil docket 25-5745, argued that standing has to be tested and that mystery affidavits are not a substitute for the claimant. A man who cannot speak to his own lawyers cannot authenticate a wallet diagram. A conglomerate that files a claim and then loses its chairman to a foreign security service is asking a U.S. court to treat silence as title.
In July, British Virgin Islands holding companies tied to the network opened Chapter 15 proceedings in New York bankruptcy court, and foreign representatives sought a voice in the asset fight. That is what a fortune looks like when the founder is in a cell and the shells are still incorporated: lawyers, not a trial. The U.S. indictment remains on paper. Extradition the other direction is politics. The AEGIS Alliance hacker news file has seen this shape before, including in the takedown of a global phishing service. A technical seizure still needs a body in the courtroom that filed the case. This file has the seizure. The body is in the wrong building.
Victims do not spend a headline number
The dollar figure moved because Bitcoin moved. The coin count did not. In March 2026 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported that the department had given little public indication of what it planned to do with the coins, then worth closer to $9 billion, and that lawyers for hundreds of alleged victims had seen claims rejected. Later market slides put some desk estimates nearer $8 billion. Civil forfeiture is not a restitution order. It is not a published claims formula. “Premature” is the word officials use when they intend to keep the asset and discuss the victims later.
The people inside the compounds were victims of a different kind. Recruits were trafficked, held, and punished for missing quotas. Neighbors lived next to buildings that were prisons with fiber. Prince Bank in Cambodia saw liquidity stress after the arrest, which is what happens when a licensed bank and a scam campus share a chairman. A forfeiture in Brooklyn does not open those doors. Thai strikes on compound districts during border fighting did not refund a savings account wired into a fake exchange. Chinese custody does not either. Americans lost at least $10 billion to Southeast Asian fraud operations in a single recent year, by the government’s own estimate. This pile is one treasury inside that loss, not the whole of it.
Related extraction on this desk includes the grandparent-scam charging wave and the debt-relief industry file. Different scripts, same design: isolate the target, invent urgency, move the money where a chargeback cannot follow. Prince Group, if the complaint holds, industrialized that design and then parked the proceeds in wallets quiet enough to look like a mining fortune. The Treasury’s own experience with state-linked intrusion is a separate file. It is also a reminder that “hacked” is a word Beijing uses when it wants a verb and does not want a victim list.
Three documents, and this case has one
A record forfeiture is a press release. A conviction is a different document. A victim check is a third. Chen’s file has the first. It does not yet have the second in Brooklyn. It does not have the third in any capital that has spoken on the record. Market desks treated the pile as a future supply overhang and, in some posts, as a candidate for a strategic reserve. Defense lawyers treated it as commingled property that would be hard to unwind if any coins had a cleaner history. The department treated distribution questions as early. Early has now lasted through a rendition, a motion to compel, and a bankruptcy sidecar.
Scam campuses in the Mekong have survived other founder arrests by changing the sign on the gate. Removing a chairman does not uninstall the scripts, the recruiters, or the compounds that still have generators. The Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime asked, after the January flight, whether Chen’s removal would be a wake-up call. History in that corridor says the campus outlives the name on the building. Until Brooklyn has a sworn claimant or a trial, and until a claims process pays the people who were locked in the rooms and the people who wired the money, the 127,271 figure is a price tag on coins and a man China will not put on a witness stand. The AEGIS Alliance will keep the international and crime files on that gap, not on the verb fight alone.
