U.S. Holds 127,271 Bitcoin From Chen Zhi Prince Group While Cambodia Flies the Accused Scam Kingpin to China

The Justice Department’s largest forfeiture is a pile of 127,271 Bitcoin that once sat in 25 unhosted wallets whose private keys, prosecutors say, belonged to Chen Zhi. When the civil complaint landed in Brooklyn on October 14, 2025, the stash was priced near $15 billion. Chen, 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” crypto fraud against victims in the United States and elsewhere. On January 6, 2026, Cambodian officials arrested him. The next day Chinese state television showed him on a plane to the People’s Republic. The coins stayed in U.S. custody.

Beijing’s public line after the seizure was that Washington had hacked a Chinese national’s coins. The U.S. line is a forfeiture complaint against proceeds of a trafficking-and-fraud empire. Those two stories use the same wallets and do not agree on the verb. The AEGIS Alliance covers the file as a three-capital problem. Cambodia hosted the compounds. The United States holds the Bitcoin and the indictment. China holds the body. None of the three has yet produced a courtroom result that pays the people who were drained.

What the complaint says the compounds were

Eastern District of New York prosecutors describe warehouse-scale fraud sites across Cambodia where people were held and forced to run romance-investment scams. Recruits 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 slowly steered a target into a fake trading platform. Treasury sanctioned 146 people and entities around Prince Group in a joint action with the United Kingdom. FinCEN used Patriot Act Section 311 tools against Huione Group as a primary money-laundering concern. Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and South Korea later froze or seized related assets. The Justice Department release called the forfeiture the largest in department history.

TRM Labs mapped the wallets into a cluster that held most of the coins and had sat largely dormant since a December 2020 movement that some market desks still describe as one of the largest Bitcoin thefts on record. That dormancy is why the pile was still in one place when U.S. agents took the keys. It is also why China could argue, without publishing a technical paper, that the coins had been lifted rather than forfeited. A seizure that uses private keys looks like a hack to the capital that does not control the keys. It looks like police work to the capital that does.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists later asked the question the press release skipped. In March 2026, ICIJ reported that the department had given little indication of what it planned to do with the coins, then worth closer to $9 billion after the price moved, and that lawyers for hundreds of alleged victims had seen claims on the fund rejected. Bitcoin’s later slide put some desk estimates nearer $8 billion. The coin count did not change. The headline number did. Victims do not spend headlines.

Two capitals, one defendant, no Brooklyn trial date that matters

Chen was born in Fujian in 1987, built Prince Group into a conglomerate with banks, real estate, and a public face in Phnom Penh, and collected the kind of political cover that keeps a compound’s generators running. Chinese court records and later reporting showed Beijing had opened a task force on his network as early as 2020. He adapted by aiming the scams at non-Chinese targets, a practice operators call “foreigner butchering.” The United States became a rich hunting ground. The indictment followed the money. The arrest followed a different logic.

Cambodia first answered the October sanctions with defensiveness. Then the Thai-Cambodia border fighting put airstrikes on some compound districts, regional partners seized assets, and China applied the pressure that actually moves a Cambodian custody decision. On January 6 he was taken. Chinese television said the charges at home included fraud and illegal casinos. “Coercive measures” is the phrase state media used. That is not an extradition to Brooklyn. It is an absorption into a system that does not publish docket numbers for foreign victims.

The U.S. indictment is still on paper. Extradition the other direction is politics, not a clerk’s stamp. The AEGIS Alliance hacker news file and the RaccoonO365 arrests are the same genre: a technical seizure that still needs a body in a courtroom the filer controls. Chen’s file has the seizure. It has a body. The body is in the wrong building.

Who keeps the coins

Civil forfeiture lets the government take property before a conviction if it can show the property is proceeds or an instrumentality of crime. The complaint against the 127,271 Bitcoin is that document. It is not a restitution order. It is not a victims’ fund with a published claims formula. Market desks treated the pile as a future supply overhang. Defense lawyers treated it as commingled property that would be hard to unwind if some coins had clean histories. The department treated questions about victim payouts as premature. Premature is a word officials use when they intend to keep the asset.

Prince Bank in Cambodia saw liquidity stress after the arrest. That is the domestic cost of a conglomerate that mixed a licensed bank with a scam campus. It is also a reminder that the victims of this network were not only the people on the other end of the chat. Workers inside the compounds were trafficked. Neighbors lived next to buildings that were prisons with fiber. A forfeiture in Brooklyn does not open those doors by itself. Thai strikes and Chinese custody do not refund a retiree in Ohio who wired a savings account into a fake exchange.

Related fraud architecture on this desk includes the grandparent-scam charging wave and the debt-relief industry file. Different scripts, same extraction. The Prince Group case is the industrial version: compounds, quotas, and a Bitcoin treasury large enough to move a national conversation about who is allowed to hold stolen coins.

The verb fight is the story

China says hacked. Washington says forfeited. Both verbs describe a transfer of control over keys. Only one of them comes with a public complaint, wallet addresses, and a sanctions list. That imbalance matters. It does not settle the policy question of whether a record seizure should become a slush pile or a restitution engine. The AEGIS Alliance’s position is the boring one. If the coins are proceeds of forced-labor fraud, the first claim on them belongs to the people who were drained and to the workers who were locked in the rooms that did the draining. A press release about “largest ever” is not that distribution.

Chen remains, in U.S. papers, a defendant at large even though cameras put him on a Chinese jet. That contradiction will last until someone in Brooklyn admits the body is not coming or until Beijing stages a trial that names the same compounds. Neither outcome is guaranteed. Scam campuses in the Mekong have survived other founder arrests by changing the sign on the gate. The Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime asked in late January whether Chen’s removal would be a wake-up call for other bosses. History in that corridor says the campus outlives the chairman.

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. Until one of those documents appears, the $15 billion figure is a price tag on a pile of coins and a man in a Chinese holding cell, not a closed case.