Chen Zhi and Prince Group: The $15B Pig-Butchering Empire

What happened

When Ron Williams, the Brooklyn retiree featured in our case file on AI pig-butchering, received the text message that ultimately cost him his $1.6 million in life savings, he assumed it was random, a stranger reaching out by mistake.

According to U.S. prosecutors, the message was not random. It came out of an industrial-scale operation: dormitory compounds in Cambodia, behind high walls and barbed wire, staffed by trafficked workers with thousands of phones running tens of thousands of social-media accounts. The man U.S. prosecutors say ran that operation is a 37-year-old Cambodian-Chinese businessman named Chen Zhi.

In October 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against him. It also announced the largest cryptocurrency forfeiture action in its history: 127,271 Bitcoin, worth roughly $15 billion, seized from wallets prosecutors say Chen controlled. The U.S. Treasury and the United Kingdom jointly sanctioned 146 individuals and entities across the Prince Group network.

Three months later, on January 6, 2026, Cambodian authorities arrested Chen in Phnom Penh and extradited him to China, where he now faces potential life imprisonment on charges including fraud, money laundering, and forced labor.

This is the story of the engine behind the scam texts millions of people now receive every week.

From conglomerate chairman to indictment

Prince Holding Group, known as Prince Group, is a Cambodian conglomerate. Chen Zhi founded it in 2015 and chaired it. On paper, the group is a diversified business: real estate development, financial services (including Prince Bank), consumer services, and investments. It operates in more than 30 countries. In Cambodia, it has been one of the highest-profile domestic conglomerates of the past decade, and Chen has been a visible public figure.

He was awarded the country's highest civilian honorific, neak okhna, a title that requires a substantial donation to the government. In 2020, he accepted a minister-level advisory role to then-Prime Minister Hun Sen. Investigative reporting suggests Chen and the group donated more than $18 million to the Cambodian government over the years.

Alongside that public profile, according to the U.S. indictment, ran a parallel criminal enterprise. Prosecutors allege Prince Group operated forced-labor “scam compounds” across Cambodia. Workers were trafficked into the compounds, often under false job offers, and then prevented from leaving. According to the DOJ, “the compounds housed vast dormitories surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, and functioned as violent forced labor camps.”

Inside, workers were made to run “pig-butchering” scams, long-grift romance and investment frauds that build emotional trust by text message and then steer victims onto fake cryptocurrency investment platforms. According to court filings described in the reporting, two specific Prince Group facilities alone housed 1,250 mobile phones that controlled 76,000 accounts on a popular social media platform.

The U.S. indictment against Chen was unsealed on October 14, 2025, in federal court in Brooklyn. He faces charges of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. On the same day, the DOJ filed a civil forfeiture complaint against 127,271 Bitcoin worth approximately $15 billion, the largest forfeiture action in U.S. Department of Justice history.

Joseph Nocella, Jr., the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in announcing the indictment that Chen “directed one of the largest investment fraud operations in history, fueling an illicit industry that is reaching epidemic proportions.” Nocella added that “Prince Group's investment scams have caused billions of dollars in losses and untold misery to victims around the world, including here in New York, on the backs of individuals who have been trafficked.”

The arrest and extradition: from Cambodia to China

Chen remained in Cambodia for three months after the U.S. indictment. Then, on January 6, 2026, Cambodian authorities arrested him alongside two other Chinese nationals, Xu Ji Liang and Shao Ji Hui. Cambodia's Interior Ministry announced that Chen's Cambodian citizenship had been revoked by royal decree the previous month, removing the legal barrier to his extradition.

On January 7, 2026, all three were extradited to China under a bilateral transnational-crime cooperation framework, not to the United States, despite the DOJ indictment. Video released by China's Ministry of Public Security showed Chen in handcuffs with a black bag over his head, escorted off a China Southern Airlines plane as armed guards waited on the runway.

China's Ministry of Public Security described Chen as “the ringleader of a major cross-border online gambling and fraud criminal syndicate,” and Chinese state television said he has been arrested for fraud and for operating illegal casinos. He has been placed under what Chinese authorities call “compulsory criminal measures.”

Legal experts estimate that if convicted in China, Chen could face life imprisonment. Chinese prosecutors are reportedly reviewing charges that include large-scale economic fraud, human trafficking, and forced labor, all of which carry severe penalties under Chinese criminal law.

Why it matters

The scale of the operation: by the numbers

The Prince Group case is not a small-time operation. The numbers, as documented in court filings and investigative reporting, are staggering:

• 127,271 Bitcoin seized by the DOJ, the largest cryptocurrency forfeiture in U.S. history, worth approximately $15 billion at the time of seizure.
• $30 million per day in alleged earnings at the operation's peak, according to statements from a key Chen associate cited in court filings.
• 146 individuals and entities sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury and UK Foreign Office in October 2025, including Chen and dozens of Prince Group affiliates.
• More than 100 shell companies allegedly used to launder proceeds across 12 countries and territories, from Singapore to St. Kitts and Nevis.
• At least 10 forced labor camps operated across Cambodia since 2015, according to U.S. prosecutors.
• £100 million+ in London properties frozen by UK authorities, including a mansion on one of London's most expensive streets and an office building in the City of London.
• $2.75 billion HKD (approximately $350 million USD) in assets frozen by Hong Kong police.
• $18 million+ in donations to the Cambodian government, which prosecutors allege were used to buy political protection.

The global scam industry, much of it centered in Southeast Asia, is estimated to be worth between $50 billion and $70 billion. In 2023 alone, it conned victims in the United States out of at least $10 billion. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has said the criminal networks that run the scam hubs are evolving at an unprecedented scale.

The forced-labor compounds: the human cost

Behind the numbers are real people, both the victims who lost their savings and the trafficked workers forced to commit the frauds.

According to Amnesty International and other rights organizations, scam compounds across Cambodia, Myanmar, and the region lure foreign nationals, many Chinese, with fake job ads, then force them under threat of violence to commit online fraud. Amnesty has identified at least 53 scam compounds in Cambodia alone, where rights groups say criminal networks perpetrate human trafficking, forced labor, torture, and slavery. Experts estimate tens of thousands of people work in the compounds across the region.

U.S. prosecutors allege Chen directly ordered and managed the assault of workers within his scam compounds. According to reporting cited in court filings, evidence includes workers who attempted to flee being beaten and forced to continue their work.

When Chen was arrested in January 2026, the news triggered a mass exodus of workers from several sprawling scam compounds across Cambodia. The chaotic rush to flee intensified after Chinese police announced that individuals linked to the Prince Group had until February 15 to surrender. With their bosses on the run, thousands of foreign nationals who had been forced to work in the premises poured onto the streets.

The legal battle over the Bitcoin seizure

The case is not closed. Chen's legal team is fighting the U.S. seizure of the 127,271 Bitcoin.

In March 2026, Chen's attorneys filed a motion in a New York federal court arguing that the government's case may be built on misidentified images, unexplained evidence, and major gaps in the timeline of how federal authorities obtained the cryptocurrency. According to the filing, photographs cited by prosecutors as evidence of criminal conduct appear to have been taken from unrelated internet sources. One image presented as evidence of a “phone farm” appears to originate from a Chinese-language news article about artificially inflating e-commerce livestream viewership.

The filing also raises questions about the Bitcoin itself. According to blockchain analysis cited in the motion, the Bitcoin at issue was transferred out of wallets associated with Chen in December 2020 during what appears to have been a massive coordinated theft, more than 127,000 Bitcoin moved within a two-hour window. Cybersecurity researchers later discovered a vulnerability in the wallet software used to generate the private keys controlling those wallets.

Chen's lawyers argue that the Bitcoin could not have been obtained through fraud or money laundering because it was stolen from him in 2020, before the alleged fraud schemes even operated at scale. The Prince Group has called the U.S. allegations “baseless and aimed at justifying the unlawful seizure of assets worth billions of dollars.”

A Singaporean court recently rejected a request by Chen's side to unfreeze funds, stating that “the source of the funds is unclear, and there is a high possibility that they are criminal proceeds.”

Why this matters for everyone who uses a phone

The Prince Group case is the story behind most of the stories AuthentiLens covers.

When a retiree loses their life savings to a “Jenny” on WhatsApp, the Jenny is not an independent operator in a coffee shop somewhere. When a small-business owner transfers money to a “Google support” impersonator, the person on the phone is not freelancing. The economics of the modern online scam are industrial, the labor force is trafficked, and the infrastructure , phones, accounts, laundering rails, crypto wallets, is supplied by a small number of large organizations that treat fraud as a product line.

Three things about the Prince Group takedown matter for anyone trying to stay safe online.

First, the scale is not a metaphor. “Billions of dollars” is not a marketing number. The DOJ's $15 billion Bitcoin forfeiture against a single organization is real money. Independent researchers including Chainalysis have catalogued pig-butchering losses of roughly $5 billion annually. A single text message is the tail end of a system.

Second, the “random” stranger who texts you is not random. Chen's compounds reportedly ran tens of thousands of social-media accounts from just two facilities. Those accounts are paired with targeting algorithms that segment victims by country, age, language, and likely disposable income. The cold “wrong number” opener that begins nearly every pig-butchering attempt is not a hopeful fishing cast into the internet. It is a calibrated outbound message from a compound.

Third, individual arrests do not dismantle the system, at least not quickly. Chen Zhi is in Chinese custody, and scam-compound workers are reportedly leaving sites in Cambodia. But the infrastructure and the criminal networks extend across jurisdictions, similar operations exist in Myanmar's Shan State, Laos's Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, and the Philippines. The tactical response from victims cannot be to wait for law enforcement. It has to be to refuse the opener.

How to protect yourself

The AuthentiLens editorial team has distilled the Prince Group case and the broader pig-butchering epidemic into six concrete protections.

1. Never engage with a cold text from a stranger. “Is this Michael?” “Hey, long time no talk!” “I had dinner with your cousin last week.” Every one of these openers is a compound script. The correct action is to block and delete. Do not reply, even to say “wrong number.” A reply tells the targeting system you are a live account.
2. Never invest in a platform recommended by someone you met online. This is the single most consistent rule. Pig-butchering compounds exist to move you from a chat onto a fake investment site. If the “opportunity” started in a DM, an app, or a “friend's broker” recommendation, it is the scam.
3. A dashboard showing gains is not the same as the money being real. Pig-butchering operations run slick fake trading platforms that display whatever numbers the operator wants. The only real test is an actual withdrawal to your own bank account. “You need to pay taxes first” is a nearly universal tell that the money was never there.
4. Call, do not text, to verify anything financial. If a family member, a boss, or a bank appears to be messaging you about money, call them at a number you already have. Scam compounds increasingly use live deepfake video and voice cloning to impersonate people you know on demand. A video call is no longer proof.
5. Have the conversation with parents and grandparents tonight. The Ron Williams case is one of thousands. Set a family code word. Agree, in advance, that no one makes a financial decision over a certain amount without a second phone call to a designated relative.
6. When something feels off, scan it. Paste any suspicious text, video, voice note, or investment website into AuthentiLens. We flag pig-butchering language patterns, AI-generated media, and impersonation signals in seconds, before the opener turns into a conversation.