Federal Reserve Seizes Record $15 Billion in Bitcoin from Alleged Fraud Empire

“Chen Qi was directly involved in the management of the fraud complexes and maintained records associated with each, including records tracking profits from scams that explicitly referred to ‘sha chu’ or pig slaughter,” the indictment alleges, alleging there were also “books of bribes to public officials.” One document allegedly kept by Chen said that two fraud centers were equipped with 1,250 mobile phones that “controlled” 76,000 social media accounts. The indictment also alleges that Chen was carrying photographs showing the “violent methods used by the Prince Group” against people who were trafficked to fraud centers. The document includes pictures showing people covered in blood and being beaten.

The seizure of 127,271 bitcoins, worth more than $15 billion at the time of their seizure, represents the largest cash seizure in the history of the US Department of Justice – not just of cryptocurrencies, but also of funds of any kind. The U.S. law enforcement record was previously set in 2022 with 95 thousand Bitcoins worth $3.6 billion were confiscated From a Manhattan couple who later pleaded guilty to stealing from the Bitfinex exchange, and before that with One billion dollars confiscated in 2020 of bitcoins were allegedly stolen from the dark web drug market Silk Road by an unnamed hacker. Meanwhile, police in the UK It confiscated 61,000 bitcoins worth $6.7 billion In June, a Chinese woman was charged in an investment fraud, an amount larger than those on US records but less than half the amount taken from the Prince Group operation.

“It is important to note that these seizures are unusual not only in terms of their size but also for what they represent,” said Ari Redbord, global head of policy at cryptocurrency tracker TRM Labs, adding that the seizures are still a “small portion” of the funds generated by the scam centers. “These are not isolated scams; they are factory-level operations powered by forced labor, supercharged by the speed and scale of cryptocurrencies, and connected through a sophisticated money laundering infrastructure stretching across Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, China and beyond,” says Redbord.

The large-scale action “strikes at the operational and financial core” of the fraud hub ecosystem at scale, Redbord says. In recent years, researchers tracking scam pools in Southeast Asia have seen rapid growth and are using their ill-gotten money to invest in them. Increasingly high-tech scams. Over the past two years, there have also been fraudulent vehicles Spotted emerging outside Southeast Asiawith locations emerging in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Africa.

“By targeting the financial infrastructure — the shell companies, banks, exchanges, and real estate that move and hide these proceeds — the US and UK are dismantling the economic engine that supports these crimes,” says Redbord. “This is what a 21st century threat funding campaign looks like – coordinated, data-driven and global.”