Chen ‘Vincent’ Zhi, the alleged ringleader of one of the largest scam operations in Southeast Asia and wanted by the United States Justice Department, was arrested on January 7 in Cambodia and extradited to China, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Chen was born in China but resided in Cambodia, where he founded the Prince Holding Group (also known as the Prince Group), described as “one of Cambodia‘s largest conglomerates.” The company has various legitimate interests, including real estate, airlines, and financial services, but is better known for its alleged illicit activity, namely running one of the largest ‘pig butchering’ scam compounds in the world.
In October 2025, Chen was charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) with wire fraud and money laundering in connection with his alleged part in the scheme, with the DOJ seizing digital wallets containing 127,217 BTC tokens worth ~$15 billion that it said were stolen from U.S. citizens and other global victims of Chen’s criminal enterprise. The indictment and historic forfeiture were the largest in DOJ history.
Allegedly, Chen and Prince Group allegedly held individuals against their will at compounds and forced them to run digital asset fraud schemes, referred to as “pig butchering” scams, in which they built relationships with unsuspecting users before stealing their funds.
“The defendant was the mastermind behind a sprawling cyber-fraud empire operating under the Prince Group umbrella, a criminal enterprise built on human suffering,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg, at the time of the indictment. “Trafficked workers were confined in prison-like compounds and forced to carry out online scams on an industrial scale, preying on thousands worldwide, including many here in the United States.”
The indictment alleged that Chen was directly involved in managing the scam compounds and maintained records associated with each one, including ledgers that tracked profits and identified which fraudulent schemes were run out of which rooms. It also accuses Chen of being directly involved in using violence against the individuals within the forced labor camps and communicating directly with his subordinates about beating individuals who “caused trouble,” in one case specifying that the victims should not be “beaten to death.”
In a November 11 statement, Prince Group denied the allegations, saying they were “baseless and appear aimed at justifying the unlawful seizure of assets worth billions of dollars.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, citing Cambodia’s interior ministry, Chen was arrested in Cambodia and extradited to China on Monday at the request of Chinese authorities “within the scope of cooperation in combating transnational crime.”
China, where Chen will now potentially answer for his alleged crimes, reportedly has criminal court judgments dating from 2020 to 2022 that describe Chen’s Prince Group as a “’notorious transnational online gambling criminal group’ that has generated at least 5 billion yuan ($700 million) in illicit revenue.”
According to a special report by Radio Free Asia in February 2024, “Beijing police established a special task force to investigate the Prince Group” in May 2020. “Since then, there have been at least seven judgments from separate Chinese provincial courts convicting low-level Prince Group or Prince Group-linked employees of gambling and money laundering offenses.”
The arrest of Chen marks a positive start to 2026 for critics of crypto crime and advocates of a clean digital asset space alike, all of whom likely share the hope of a less fruitful year for illicit activity than 2025, which saw over $3.4 billion worth of digital assets illegally obtained via hacks, exploits, and compromises—based on an end-of-the-year report from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis.
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Source: https://coingeek.com/alleged-pig-butchering-mastermind-arrested-in-cambodia/
