Prince Group in a different spotlight
On October 8th, 2025, the US Attorney’s Office in New York filed numerous charges. At the same time, investigators froze 127,271 bitcoins worth 15 billion US dollars, believed to be under the private control of one man called Chen Zhi. This wasn’t just another cybercrime case. It was the largest cryptocurrency seizure in FBI history and that’s not all.
The investigation began quietly. American victims, more than 250 of them, reported that they had been seduced by online strangers posing as admirers, mentors, or investment partners. Online lovers would seek financial support. Investment gurus gave promises of wealth. The victims would install apps with screen displays full of fake profits. After the victims have invested everything they could, the apps would fail. By then, the money would have untraceably zigzagged through a maze of e-wallets, shell companies, and offshore financial networks.
This time, investigators didn’t lose the money trail. It led to Cambodia. It led to a conglomerate called Prince Group. And ultimately, it led to a man called Chen Zhi. Undercover operations, intercepted communications and whistleblower testimony revealed something darker than just digital fraud.
Inside Chen Zhi’s compounds, thousands of workers, mostly ethnic Chinese, were held as prisoners. Many had been lured by false job offers. Others had been kidnapped, trafficked, or sold. The terms were very straightforward: scam or suffer. Those who failed to hit “sales targets” were beaten. Some were electrocuted. Some vanished without a trace, believed to have been the victims of organ harvesting.
For years, the outside world saw something else. Chen Zhi’s face appeared in glossy magazines. Chinese state media praised him as a model of corporate responsibility. Awards followed — philanthropy, brand excellence, leadership. Diplomats visited him. Officials posed for photographs. His business empire expanded to include: casinos, real estate, finance, aviation and cryptocurrency. But beneath it all, the only activities that funded the rest were fraud, human trafficking, organised crime.
Chen Zhi’s wealth and influence grew to such an extent that Cambodia’s elite embraced him. He received royal-style titles and political protection at the highest levels — including ties to the family of former Prime Minister Hun Sen. Financial analysts now believe that the Prince Group was not just a rogue corporation but part of a regional criminal ecosystem spanning Southeast Asia, China, and even North Korea.
To many, this revelation is a major victory against scam operations in SE Asia; a message that even in shady, obscure corners of the digital world, someone is watching. But for the thousands still trapped in scam compounds across Southeast Asia and for the millions defrauded worldwide, this is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning. Because the question remains: If Chen Zhi is only one character in this massive multidisciplinary operation, how deep does this network really go?
The Prince Group headquarters are located on Diamond Island, Phnom Penh, in Cambodia — often referred to by Chinese media as China’s backyard. With such a scandalous bombshell dropped on the “backyard” recently, Chinese media couldn’t stay silent anymore. So articles began circulating, claiming that China had been investigating Chen Zhi and the Prince Group since 2019.
But Chinese netizens who had been following business news were quick to point out the U-turn because everyone remembered what Chinese state media said before October 2025. For eight years, every major state outlet praised Chen Zhi as a philanthropist and model corporate leader. Netizens quickly dug up surviving articles, including: A 2022 China Finance Summit report announcing Prince Group had “again” won the CSR Award. A 2024 Economic News Network article praising Chen Zhi for winning the 2023 Global Brand Award and calling his company “the backbone of society.” Everything else praising him has since been scrubbed from online sources.
But it wasn’t just the media. Chinese officials also helped to sing praises for Chen Zhi and his Prince Group. The chairman of Beijing Red Cross Foundation called upon him to award him for “charity.” Provincial commerce officials from Shanxi visited Cambodia to “learn from him.” So the obvious question on the minds of those who remembered is: Were Chinese authorities blind to his criminal activities? Did they not know that his real business was fraud and organ trafficking?
A bit of background info. Chen Zhi was born in 1987 in Lianjiang 连江 County, Fujian Province, China. For his first 20 years, he was an ordinary small-town youth. His stature wasn’t imposing and he dropped out after just 2 years in secondary school to work in internet cafés. Lianjiang is a somewhat obscure place but it is the birthplace of China’s shady online gambling economy, which gradually evolved into today’s telecom scam industry.
From 2002–2007, half of China’s internet cafés were run by people who hailed from Lianjiang, especially in Shanghai. Among them, Chen Zhi’s café took a different path: running illegal game servers earning him his first pot of gold. However, observers believe he did not build the system himself, but partnered with underground tech teams running illegal private servers nationwide.
After being hit by lawsuits and crackdowns, Chen fled China in 2009, landing in Cambodia — where he was free to build his business empire unmolested. By 2015 he founded Prince Group. By his late 20s, he controlled casinos, financial institutions and real estate companies.
But the gambling business alone couldn’t explain his wealth. Cambodia’s gambling revenue is only 1/30–1/40 of Macau’s. The real source of his income was telecom scams. His earliest “workers” were unemployed Lianjiang migrants, many thinking they were joining a fellow townsman. Instead, they were imprisoned and forced to scam or die. Over time, Prince Group built over a dozen scam megacomplexes in Cambodia,
locking up around 100,000 workers, mostly Chinese. Some joined willingly. Others were victims of fake job offers.
Chen Zhi then diversified his business with no intention to make money but to cover up his shady businesses and for money laundering purposes. By his early 30s, he was untouchable. He lived like a royal and received titles from Cambodia’s elites, including Prime Minister Hun Sen himself — becoming a “Grand Duke.” He also holds citizenships in Cyprus and Vanuatu.
Inevitably, a lot of Chen’s businesses spilled over to China. From 2019 onward, Chinese police received reports about missing Chinese workers. There were small joint rescue operations, but only a handful of forced labour at the scam centres managed to escape. Meanwhile, Prince Group openly rented offices in Beijing, recruited scam centre workers in mainstream job markets and operated direct flight routes between China and Cambodia to beef up the “workforce” in Cambodia.
Did all this not trigger suspicion? Apparently, Chen Zhi had powerful “godfathers” in China. Like most shady businessmen, Chen Zhi maintained ties with high-ranking officials in China’s Ministry of Public Security and Ministry of State Security. He even held a Chinese diplomatic passport issued in 2020, allowing free movement to many countries normally requiring visas for Chinese nationals. He reportedly bought luxury cars, watches and even a yacht for senior officials so the authorities were instructed to look the other way.
What actually happened inside these industrial complexes which are part of China’s Belt and Road initiative? Crimes include human trafficking, forced labour, torture, extortion for ransom money in exchange for freedom, murder, organ harvesting of dead workers and of course, money laundering operations to cover up and legitimise criminal proceeds.
To avoid excessive public scrutiny, Chen Zhi’s assets are widely distributed. On 30th October 2025, Singapore authorities seized and issued prohibition of disposal orders against financial assets worth over S$150 million as part of forgery and money laundering investigations into Cambodia’s Prince Holding Group and its founder Chen Zhi. The assets include six properties, bank accounts, securities accounts and cash. The Singapore authorities also claimed that they had been watching Chen Zhi for a long time. International investigations have frozen hundreds of millions in assets linked to Prince Group in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc. Multiple sources state that Chen Zhi is still at large and believed to be evading capture.