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.
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.
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.
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.
Typically, they need to get a conviction in court to actually do anything with the seized funds. At the moment, they don't even have the guy in custody.
> 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”
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.
Khesrau Behroz did an amazing podcast about those operations (in German though) [0]. Basically when there was a crack down on providers of illegal sports betting in China, they went abroad and diversified. The betting operation is used to launder the money from those scam operations and betting is still immensely popular in China and done via VPN. Those East Asian sport betting providers are sponsors of many Champions League clubs so their (often changing) names get know the gamblers in China watching the games.
So yea, there are massive amounts of money involved.
Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia thailand also catched a few. I would not be surprised if they take advantage of westerners as well. 15Billion++ is a big incentive.
I heard an agent got court for opening bank accounts for them in Pattaya, over 500 accounts. We have had crackdowns on banking here in Thailand ever since.
From the webpage:
"
The Executive Order begins to resolve the current disjointed handling of cryptocurrencies seized through forfeiture by, and scattered across, various Federal agencies.
Currently, no clear policy exists for managing these assets, leading to a lack of accountability and inadequate exploration of options to centralize, secure, or maximize their value.
Taking affirmative steps to centralize ownership, control, and management of these assets within the Federal government will ensure proper oversight, accurate tracking, and a cohesive approach to managing the government’s cryptocurrency holdings.
This move harnesses the power of digital assets for national prosperity, rather than letting them languish in limbo.
"
Well how would you know who to return it to? It's crypto, the genius system which will totally replace money, which doesn't allow you to track simple things like transaction history and remedy fraud like this.
It's not like a cambodian pig butchering operation is going to keep detailed ledgers of who they scammed and for how much.
> ”Well how would you know who to return it to? It's crypto, … which doesn't allow you to track simple things like transaction history”
That’s not actually correct. The blockchain contains a permanent, immutable, and public record of every transaction.
Obviously you also need a way to connect a given wallet ID (address) back to it’s owner, but if transactions originated from regulated platforms like Binance then they will have those records thanks to KYC/AML rules.
If the transaction originated from a private wallet, a fraud victim could simply submit proof of their wallet ID as part of their claim.
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.
At this point its accurate to say the Cambodian leadership have completely been subjugated through corruption and that they are no longer running the country but Chinese OCGs who are affiliated with CCP and that they are probably influencing it at a state level on all matters.
We are seeing similar attempts in other Southeast Asian countries and even Korea but Cambodia seems like an outlier. It's sad that not enough of these subversive influence campaigns by China is being talked about here.
Once again, it is America leading the way and using its vast intelligence and military power to be a de-facto global police. Obviously DOJ acted because of Americans were victimized but in doing so have done what South Korean government failed to do.
Lot of heat and criticisms against South Korean government now and its embassy in Cambodia that have largely acted in negligence, even telling one of the victims to report it to Cambodian police and don't bother them.
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.
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.
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 :)
What it means, is that the average person doesn't care about Bitcoin, so if you want the article to apply it the average person, you need to denominate the value in something else.
If someone stole 22 WobiBobbyBones I wouldn't care. If a WobiBobbyBone was worth a billion dollars, then I'd think that's news.
So if somebody sized a stock portfolio should they mention the number of shares? The market value is in most cases more interesting than the number of coins.
While the USD value is important, this puts the number in perspective, since only 21M BTC can ever exist (and a good number of them are out of circulation for various reasons).
It could be more or less meaningful depending on how long the operation has been running, I suppose. That would impact on the integral of the value that was expropriated, as of the time of expropriation.
It's CNBC. They have to write this for people who know what a bitcoin is worth, people who know a bitcoin is a thing but have no idea what they're worth, and people who've only ever heard the phrase "bitcoin" as a series of noises. But everyone reading cnbc knows what a dollar is.
If they mention it by number of BTC then the USD value would be different for every person who read the article, in a few days it might be dramatically different. Who knows?
Agreed. Just like the record price of gold never mentions inflation-adjusted figures, news reporters/editors make the minimum effort, maximum "hype" choices.
Ross Ulbricht had more, at over 144,000⁽¹⁾, with additional 51,000 seized from a hacker⁽²⁾.
> 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.
79 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 85.0 ms ] threadClearly should’ve used an offline wallet lol.
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.
$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.
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.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chairman-prince-group-indicte...
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.
U.S. Sanctions Cambodian Conglomerate, Citing Role in 'Pig-Butchering' Scams
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584418
After obtaining the bitcoins, are they forced to sell it immediately? How does this affect the market?
Other way around, by executive order they're forced to hold it in a sovereign wealth fund.
> 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”
Well done DOJ. Hopefully the victims get their money back.
So yea, there are massive amounts of money involved.
[0] https://www.rbb-online.de/legion/
I heard an agent got court for opening bank accounts for them in Pattaya, over 500 accounts. We have had crackdowns on banking here in Thailand ever since.
The DOJ adds seized crypto to the American crypto reserve. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...
From the webpage: " The Executive Order begins to resolve the current disjointed handling of cryptocurrencies seized through forfeiture by, and scattered across, various Federal agencies. Currently, no clear policy exists for managing these assets, leading to a lack of accountability and inadequate exploration of options to centralize, secure, or maximize their value. Taking affirmative steps to centralize ownership, control, and management of these assets within the Federal government will ensure proper oversight, accurate tracking, and a cohesive approach to managing the government’s cryptocurrency holdings. This move harnesses the power of digital assets for national prosperity, rather than letting them languish in limbo. "
It's not like a cambodian pig butchering operation is going to keep detailed ledgers of who they scammed and for how much.
That’s not actually correct. The blockchain contains a permanent, immutable, and public record of every transaction.
Obviously you also need a way to connect a given wallet ID (address) back to it’s owner, but if transactions originated from regulated platforms like Binance then they will have those records thanks to KYC/AML rules.
If the transaction originated from a private wallet, a fraud victim could simply submit proof of their wallet ID as part of their claim.
We are seeing similar attempts in other Southeast Asian countries and even Korea but Cambodia seems like an outlier. It's sad that not enough of these subversive influence campaigns by China is being talked about here.
Once again, it is America leading the way and using its vast intelligence and military power to be a de-facto global police. Obviously DOJ acted because of Americans were victimized but in doing so have done what South Korean government failed to do.
Lot of heat and criticisms against South Korean government now and its embassy in Cambodia that have largely acted in negligence, even telling one of the victims to report it to Cambodian police and don't bother them.
Large scam call centers run by Chinese nationals are getting broken up in the region pretty regularly.
Edit: Wow, people really don't want to know how many Bitcoins were seized :)
If someone stole 22 WobiBobbyBones I wouldn't care. If a WobiBobbyBone was worth a billion dollars, then I'd think that's news.
Ross Ulbricht had more, at over 144,000⁽¹⁾, with additional 51,000 seized from a hacker⁽²⁾.
[1] https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/22/ross-ulbricht-pardon-b...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-h....
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.