Taiwanese prosecutors have indicted 62 people — including the alleged mastermind Chen Zhi — and 13 companies for allegedly laundering $339 million through Taiwan on behalf of the Prince Group, a network the U.S. Department of Justice has labeled a transnational criminal organization.
The charges, announced in Taipei, accuse the group of using shell companies, luxury purchases, sports cars, real estate, online gambling and underground remittances to “conceal and disguise the source and flow of the criminal proceeds.” Prosecutors say roughly $174 million of the $339 million routed through Taiwan has already been seized. They added the operation “seriously disrupted Taiwan’s financial order and social stability” and damaged its international reputation.
Chen Zhi — identified as the group’s chairman and alleged ringleader — was arrested in Cambodia and extradited to China earlier this year. In October last year he was also indicted in federal court in Brooklyn on wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy charges tied to so‑called “pig butchering” scams run from scam compounds in Cambodia that allegedly used coerced labor.
U.S. authorities have pursued parallel, sweeping actions. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York and the Justice Department’s National Security Division filed a civil forfeiture complaint seeking 127,271 BTC (then valued at roughly $15 billion) — the largest forfeiture action in DOJ history. The Prince Group has denied wrongdoing through a U.S. law firm, Reuters reported in November.
The case is part of a broader crackdown on Southeast Asian scam compounds. Interpol recently warned that these compound operations — which use social engineering to coax victims into buying cryptocurrency and then hijack those funds through fake investment sites and apps — have become a global threat. In 2025, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned 19 entities across Burma and Cambodia as part of efforts that followed scams costing victims more than $10 billion in 2024.
A cross‑agency strike force targeting scam centers reported last month that it had frozen or seized about $580 million in cryptocurrency. Blockchain analytics firm Cyvers told Decrypt it has identified roughly 27,000 increasingly decentralized and hybrid criminal groups linked to pig butchering schemes, and estimates around $27.5 billion in fraud exposure and illicit value flows tied to those networks.
Why it matters for crypto: the indictments and massive forfeiture action underline intensifying global enforcement against crypto‑enabled fraud and money‑laundering schemes. The case also highlights how traditional financial channels and on‑chain movements can be combined by criminals — and how governments and analytics firms are increasingly coordinating to trace and seize ill‑gotten crypto assets.
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