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.
Cambodia is fully commited to scam centers and Thailand doesn't like that and even reached out to Xi directly for cooperation here. Not even a year later the conflict broke.
Finally, cambodia is not suffering at all and if anything the current dictator has become significantly stronger and the country has been on a huge nationalist rise as the dictators control the scam centers and easily repurpose them for online propaganda.
$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.
> Chen personally maintained records of the wallet addresses and seed phrases associated with the private keys for each.
So it sounds like they have the seed phrases and thus the private keys.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...
If not, why wouldn't he just transfer the funds to a new seed?
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.
> Chen personally maintained records of the wallet addresses and seed phrases associated with the private keys for each.
So he wrote the passwords down, basically.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...
[0] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/starlink--an-internet-l...
You end up dead because your co-conspirators don't want to end up in a cage.
Wonder how this whole concept overlays onto LLMs, with a lot more money on the line and a lot less regulation.
Comparing a scam to war is inaccurate. The Cold War was a war running cold with the potential to go hot. Cambodia and America are not going to war over this.
Like whom? We (and let's be honest, every other great power) are at war with many countries all of the time, and while they may be cold for long stretches, they absolutely (a) go hot from time to time and (b) are constantly threatening to go hot.
To me "war" is a state of "no rules" hurting. IE nuclear, biological, any weapon goes. Anything less is an exercise in restraint - even if still quite terrible in it's own right.
Which means there are lots of "exercises" of varying lethality, risk profiles, spheres of influence, etc. And yes many countries are jockeying against other countries in varying ways.
Large scale scams against other countries could be seen as an unintended (not a planned government action) exercise that is condoned by the government.
Meanwhile, China never cracked down against similar scams in Cambodia. Most notably, Prince Group remains unsanctioned in China and it's leadership are Mainland Chinese in origin.
While pig butchering (along with opium and human trafficking and other organized crime activities) are a major reason behind Chinese involvement in Myanmar, ignoring the very real proxy war going on between Chinese and Indian interests in Myanmar fails to contextualize some of the decisions that both countries make within Myanmar.
This also explains why you don't see a similar crackdown in Cambodia, which is solidly within the Chinese sphere at this point.
[0] - https://www.stimson.org/2025/rare-earths-and-realpolitik-fut...
[1] - https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/war-against-the-junta/ignorin...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-explores-rare-eart...
It's reminiscent of stories about Russian malware doing nothing on machines with Cyrillic keyboard layouts.
Cambodia continues to have scam centers targeting Putonghua speakers (including PRC nationals), but there hasn't been a similar crackdown on such activities due to Chinese pressure.
The crackdown in Kokang happened after China flipped to supporting the Tatmadaw against the Northern Alliance [0] and India began peeling historically India-aligned members of the alliance like the KIA and the Arakan Army back into Indian orbit [1].
P.S. Circa 2 years ago, a large portion of Chinese in SF Chinatown became Kokang and Cambodian Chinese. Bamar, Kuki-Zo, and Kachin Myanmarese primarily reside in Daly City, Ingleside/Outer Mission, and Oakland/East Bay.
SF has a lot of Asian and Latiné subcultures and communities - it's kind of insane how underdocumented it is under the guise of "Asian" and "Latino"
[0] - https://www.stimson.org/2025/too-little-too-late-china-steps...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/india-extends-unp...
Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos
This one of the other organizations / major bank used for money laundering directly linked to Hun Sen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huione_Group
> The company is linked to Cambodia's ruling Hun family, which includes the current prime minister, Hun Manet.[4] His cousin Hun To is a major shareholder and director of Huione Pay
Are you saying that 30-50% of Cambodia's economy can be directly attributed to scamming and casinos? I find that shocking and hard to believe. Do you have a source for that statement?
the economy is not that big to start with :)
GDP $49.8 Billion (nominal; 2025)
Some examples
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/cambodia...
Second, most of the money would not make it to the Cambodian economy. It is likely laundered abroad. The whole operation is likely multinational, with only the workforce located in Cambodia.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chairman-prince-group-indicte...
If they're going to be only prosecuting crimes where there's something in it for them it's going to be a very unsafe society.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
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.
My assumption is that at this point they just have orders from a judge allowing them to do it and they will find the means later.
Yes, and the other big questions are how they even know about the existence of the bitcoin and then how they were able to demonstrate sufficient probable cause to a judge that A) the bitcoin belongs to the suspect, and B) this bitcoin is the direct proceeds of the charged crimes. Given the extremely unusual circumstances around this seizure, its unprecedented size and the complete lack of details - I suspect something new and interesting has happened here.
Unfortunately, we may never find out unless they manage to arrest the suspect, which seems unlikely. The more interesting scenario might be if the Prince Group files suit challenging the seizure. In that case, the government would not only have to produce evidence proving A and B above, but also that the evidence wasn't obtained illegally (like from secret NSA wiretaps on domestic Cambodian telecoms or targeted covert hacking). Given the circumstances, it's hard to imagine the FBI being able to offer plausible 'parallel construction' to support the legality of the evidence.
> Those funds (the Defendant Cryptocurrency) are presently in the custody of the U.S. government.
> The defendant and his co-conspirators subsequently used some of the criminal proceeds for luxury travel and entertainment and to make extravagant purchases such as watches, yachts, private jets, vacation homes, high-end collectables, and rare artwork, including a Picasso painting purchased through an auction house in New York City.
My guess some of defendants were in New York or around the US. You can be a criminal master mind and also be a complete f*king idiot.
Am I slow??? or what under circumstance that you expect FBI to told press how their operate????
U.S. Sanctions Cambodian Conglomerate, Citing Role in 'Pig-Butchering' Scams
After obtaining the bitcoins, are they forced to sell it immediately? How does this affect the market?
> Once they did, however, the marshals fell back on standard procedure, preparing to handle the Bitcoin the same way they would a coke smuggler’s speedboat: by auctioning it off. That posed challenges because of the sheer size of the seizure—about 175,000 Bitcoins, or 2% of all the Bitcoin in circulation at the time. According to a prosecutor familiar with the case, the marshals opted for a staggered series of auctions to avoid crashing Bitcoin’s price. In four auctions between June 2014 and November 2015, the marshals sold the Silk Road Bitcoins for an average price of $379. (https://fortune.com/crypto/2018/02/21/government-forfeiture-...)
There were also some bitcoins seized from a hacker that stole them from Silk Road in 2013, and when they seized it in 2020 it was worth $1B, now it's worth $6.5B. Nice profit for the government. https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/09/federal-government-all...
I wish this were really just a joke, but I wouldn’t put it past them to raid, hoard, dump, and therefore crash the price of Bitcoin as a strategy to undermine Bitcoin’s position as a stable digital asset for storing value.
Perhaps though it would be just as scurrilous to hoard Bitcoin and not sell it, in an effort to prop up all digital coins as being things of value when they really aren’t?
The only real conclusion I can rely on is it is problematic for one’s government to be run by a tulip bulb salesman while also raiding criminals with tulip bulb warehouses.
> 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.
How about cash it out and trickle it down to us... or is all that just gonna magically disappear?
1. The feds can't take your money.
2. Once your money's gone, it's gone.
Large scam call centers run by Chinese nationals are getting broken up in the region pretty regularly.
- There's a lot of Chinese people in the region (1.3b vs <20M in Cambodia)
- Better access to capital for setting up big operations like this
- Much tighter control and policing in their homeland, so the scammers operate elsewhere
walletdrainer•16h ago
Clearly should’ve used an offline wallet lol.
yellow_lead•3h ago
ozgrakkurt•3h ago
mv•2h ago
fruitworks•1h ago
netsharc•57m ago
otikik•47m ago
yreg•22m ago
0xOsprey•1h ago
tl;dr: Someone cracked these weak entropy wallets 3+ years before anyone else and kept it secret
Whether that was the USG or another entity has yet to be revealed
adamors•1h ago
hshdhdhehd•39m ago