Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned workers to trick unsuspecting people into making investments in bogus funds, often after spending months faking romantic relationships with the victims.
Such “pig slaughter“Scams have operated for years. They typically work when members of the operation start conversations with people on social media and then spend months messaging them. Often, scammers pose as attractive individuals who feign romantic interest in the victim.
Forced labor, telephone farms and human suffering
In the end, the conversations revolve around fake investment funds with the ultimate goal of convincing the victim to transfer. large amounts of bitcoins. In many cases, scammers are trafficked and held against their will in compounds surrounded by fences and barbed wire.
On Tuesday, federal prosecutors revealed a accusation against Chen Zhi, founder and chairman of a multinational business conglomerate based in Cambodia. It alleged that Zhi ran a forced labor scam operation that, with the help of anonymous accomplices, obtained billions of dollars from victims.
“Defendant CHEN ZHI and his co-conspirators designed the complexes to maximize profits and personally ensured that they had the necessary infrastructure to reach the greatest number of victims possible,” prosecutors wrote in the court document, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The accusation continued:
For example, in or around 2018, Co-Conspirator-1 was involved in obtaining millions of mobile phone numbers and account passwords from an illicit online marketplace. In or around 2019, Co-Conspirator-3 helped oversee the construction of the Golden Fortune complex. CHEN itself maintained documents describing and depicting “phone farms,” automated call centers used to facilitate cryptocurrency investment fraud and other cybercrimes, including the following image:
Credit: Department of Justice
Prosecutors said Zhi is the founder and chairman of Prince Group, a Cambodian corporate conglomerate that apparently operated dozens of legitimate business entities in more than 30 countries. However, secretly, Zhi and top executives turned the Prince Group into one of the largest transnational criminal organizations in Asia. Zhi’s whereabouts are unknown.
