Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged mastermind of an operation that used prisoners to trick unsuspecting people into investing in shell funds, often after they spent months faking romantic relationships with victims.
Such “pig cuttingScams have been operating for many years. They typically work when members of an operation start conversations with people on social media and then send them messages for months. Fraudsters often pretend to be attractive personalities who feign romantic interest in the victim.
Forced labor, telephone farms and human suffering
Eventually the conversations turn to fake investment funds with the ultimate goal of convincing the victim to transfer money. a large number of bitcoins. In many cases, scammers are sold and held against their will in an area surrounded by fences and barbed wire.
Federal prosecutors unsealed the case Tuesday. indictment against Chen Zhi, the founder and chairman of a multinational business conglomerate based in Cambodia. It alleged that Zhi ran such a fraudulent forced labor operation that, with the help of unnamed accomplices, netted victims billions of dollars.
“Defendant CHEN ZHI and his co-conspirators designed the complexes to maximize profits and personally provided the necessary infrastructure to reach as many victims as possible,” prosecutors wrote in a court document filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The accusation continued:
For example, around 2018, Co-Conspirator-1 was involved in purchasing millions of mobile phone numbers and account passwords from an illicit online marketplace. Around 2019, Co-Conspirator 3 helped oversee the construction of the Golden Fortune complex. CHEN himself kept documents describing and depicting “phone farms,” automated call centers used for cryptocurrency investment scams and other cybercrimes, including the image below:
Photo: Ministry of Justice.
Prosecutors said Kye is the founder and chairman of the Prince Group, a Cambodian corporate conglomerate that allegedly operated dozens of legitimate businesses in more than 30 countries. However, in secret, Zhi and top managers turned the Prince Group into one of Asia's largest transnational criminal organizations. Zhi's whereabouts are unknown.
