Justice or Jackpot? DOJ’s $15B Bitcoin Seizure From Prince Group Raises Eyebrows

When the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the indictment of Prince Group Chairman Chen Zhi in October 2025, it was supposed to be a landmark moment. A record $15 billion worth of Bitcoin (BTC) was seized. A criminal empire allegedly built on human trafficking and forced labor, dismantled. 

A message, as U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi put it, that “the United States will use every tool at its disposal to defend victims, recover stolen assets, and bring to justice those who exploit the vulnerable for profit.”

Five months later, the picture looks very different.

The seized 127,271 BTC, now valued at roughly $9 billion, remain in government custody with no clear timeline for victim restitution. The DOJ has been rapidly rejecting claims filed by attorneys representing hundreds of alleged scam victims. And a fresh ICIJ investigation has revealed serious irregularities in the government’s own case, including photos presented as evidence of Prince Group violence that appear to have nothing to do with the organization.

So the question is no longer just about what the Prince Group did. It is also about what the U.S. government plans to do with the money, and whether its case is as strong as it claimed.

What the DOJ originally alleged

The indictment, unsealed in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, charged Chen Zhi, a 37-year-old Cambodian national and Founder of Prince Holding Group, with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. The DOJ alleged that Chen ran one of Asia’s largest transnational criminal organizations under the cover of a legitimate business conglomerate operating in over 30 countries.

The core allegation was that Prince Group operated forced labor scam compounds across Cambodia, where trafficked workers were held against their will and made to run cryptocurrency investment fraud schemes, commonly known as “pig butchering” scams, that stole billions from victims around the world.

FBI Director Kash Patel called it “one of the largest financial fraud takedowns in history.”

The DOJ also alleged that Chen and his associates used sophisticated crypto laundering techniques, including “spraying” and “funneling” methods where large volumes of cryptocurrency were repeatedly broken up across dozens of wallet addresses and then consolidated again to obscure the source. Some proceeds were laundered through Prince Group’s own gambling and crypto mining operations. 

The indictment describes luxury spending from these funds, including yachts, private jets, and even a Picasso painting purchased through a New York auction house.

If convicted, Chen faces up to 40 years in prison. He was arrested in Cambodia and sent to China in January 2026.

The U.S. Treasury Department also designated Prince Group as a transnational criminal organization and announced sanctions against Chen and several associated entities. The U.K. issued parallel sanctions the same day.

Victim claims are being rejected. Attorneys are frustrated.

While the headlines focused on the scale of the seizure, what has followed since is far less reassuring for the people who actually lost money.

The DOJ has been rejecting victim claims at pace, citing reasons ranging from lack of specific evidence linking individual scam cases to the seized Bitcoin, to arguments that victims had no legal standing to claim the funds in the first place.

Daniel Thornburgh, an attorney representing hundreds of alleged victims, told ICIJ that his conversations with DOJ lawyers left him convinced the government was committed to denying claims. He flew to Cambodia in early March on what he called a “long-shot mission” to collect additional evidence linking his clients’ cases to Prince Group. 

After a grueling week of interviewing dozens of former scam compound workers, he came back largely empty-handed.

“It was an incredible amount of work to demonstrate what I probably already knew, which was: this was going to be impossible,” Thornburgh said. “Even if I was successful, victims or their lawyers should not have to travel all the way across the world to recover their assets.”

What makes the situation worse is that scam victims face a structural disadvantage. The laundering was highly complex, and without more information from the DOJ about how it actually obtained the Bitcoin and how the laundering chain worked, linking any individual scam to this specific pile of crypto is extremely difficult.

Marc Fitapelli, a New York-based attorney who also represents crypto scam victims, told ICIJ that a call with DOJ lawyers last month gave him little to work with. “I was told that victims will be contacted by the government if/when the DOJ determines it is appropriate,” he said. “So victims should hope that some lawyer at the Justice department stumbles on their file and contacts them? This is so unfair.”

Fitapelli added, “What’s happening here is not normal at all. There should be an independent person appointed by the court to have control over these assets.”

The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve fear

A major concern hanging over the case is where the seized Bitcoin might ultimately end up.

Shortly after the seizure was announced, U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis suggested the funds could be used to strengthen President Donald Trump’s national Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, a government-held crypto stockpile that industry proponents believe will help boost Bitcoin’s global prominence.

For victim attorneys, this possibility is deeply troubling.

“This would lead to victims being revictimized by their own government,” Thornburgh said.

A growing number of attorneys and victim advocates are now calling for a special victim fund to take over responsibility for the seized assets. Erin West, Founder of Operation Shamrock, an advocacy group for victims of cyber scams, told ICIJ her organization would be working with partners to push for legislation that directs the funds to victims. “We have an amazing opportunity to put found assets back into the hands of those who deserve it most,” West said.

In a separate but related case, the DOJ’s own filing in another high-profile crypto forfeiture action offered a troubling preview of the government’s thinking. Government attorneys argued that victims did not deserve to recover funds because they had “voluntarily” transferred them to scammers. The filing stated that “although their voluntary transfers may have been induced through misrepresentations, those transfers were made voluntarily nonetheless.”

The DOJ declined to comment on the Prince Group case.

Questions about Bitcoin’s origin

Beyond the victim restitution fight, there are deeper questions about the seized Bitcoin itself.

According to the DOJ’s filings, the Prince Group’s laundering operation funneled scam proceeds into a Bitcoin mining company called LuBian, which created new, “clean” coins. But blockchain analysts have pointed out something unusual about the timeline. The 127,271 Bitcoin were reportedly stolen by an unknown hacker in 2020 and then sat completely dormant in crypto wallets for years, untouched between late 2020 and mid-2024, when the cache moved to a new set of wallets.

The DOJ has not explained how it came into possession of the Bitcoin. This silence has opened the door to competing theories. China’s cybercrime agency has gone as far as to suggest that the U.S. government itself originally acquired the Bitcoin through hacking in 2020.

Last week, lawyers representing Chen demanded that the DOJ explain how it seized the funds. They also pointed to a logical problem with the forfeiture complaint: some of the DOJ’s most specific descriptions of Prince Group scams involve frauds from 2021 and 2022, which took place after Bitcoin had already gone dormant in 2020.

A spokesperson for the Prince Group told ICIJ that “this indictment is simply air cover for a giant cash grab, one that both does a disservice to the victims of these crypto scams and injustice to an innocent man.”

The spokesperson added, “Prosecutors used exaggerations, deceit, and outright impossibilities to convince a court to retroactively approve their theft of Bitcoin and to convince a grand jury of everyday Americans to indict an innocent man, Chen Zhi.”

Evidence problems in the indictment

Perhaps the most striking revelations from the ICIJ investigation concern the evidence the DOJ actually presented in its case.

Several photos included in the indictment as proof of Prince Group’s violent methods appear to have no connection to the organization. One photo showing a man bound to an overturned plastic lawn chair, presented by prosecutors as an example of violence at scam compounds, was traced by ICIJ to a Mongolian-language website. 

The original post, from April 2020, described a medical incident where a man’s body got stuck in a lawn chair and had to be freed by medical workers. There was no mention of the Prince Group or any criminal activity.

In another instance, a man portrayed in the indictment as a victim of Prince Group violence told ICIJ in a video interview that the photo actually showed injuries from a drunken fight in 2015. He said he had never been the victim of any organized crime. A visual forensics expert at UC Berkeley confirmed the man in the Zoom call was the same person pictured in the indictment.

The DOJ declined to comment on the photographs.

These findings do not necessarily invalidate the broader case against Chen Zhi or the Prince Group. But for a case of this magnitude, involving the largest asset seizure in U.S. history and allegations of large-scale human trafficking, sloppy evidence raises legitimate questions about how carefully this indictment was put together.

What happens next?

The case sits at an uncomfortable intersection of several major issues: the growing epidemic of crypto scams, the difficulty victims face in recovering funds, the U.S. government’s expanding interest in holding Bitcoin as a strategic asset, and the geopolitical tension between the U.S. and China.

For victims, the path forward remains unclear. Legislative action may offer the best hope. But for now, the $9 billion in Bitcoin sits in government custody, the DOJ is not providing answers, and the people who lost their savings to scams linked to the Prince Group are still waiting.

As ICIJ’s broader Coin Laundry investigation has shown, this is far from an isolated problem. Cryptocurrency scam victims routinely face enormous difficulty getting their money back, and law enforcement responses are often slow or nonexistent. The Prince Group case was supposed to be different because the money was actually found and seized. Whether it ever reaches the people it was stolen from is another story entirely.

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