127,271 bitcoin. Five years of stillness on the blockchain. No police report, no insurance claim, no regulatory filing — just a cluster of wallets holding roughly $3.5 billion in late 2020, swelling to $15 billion by the time anyone with a badge touched them.
On October 14, 2025, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment and a civil forfeiture complaint that, taken together, amount to what the Department of Justice has called the largest asset seizure in its history. The coins had been sitting, unmoved, for nearly five years. Their original owner never filed a police report. He couldn’t.
The forfeiture is historic on its own terms. The story of how those coins moved in 2020, and why nobody said a word, is something else. A theft of this scale would, under any conventional framework, generate police reports, insurance claims, regulatory filings, and the kind of public noise that follows large financial crime. None of that happened. The largest single-event bitcoin movement of 2020 unfolded in complete silence, and the question of why is what makes this case structurally different from anything that came before it.
That silence is the case.
The man named in the indictment is Chen Zhi, a 37-year-old businessman who built Prince Group into one of Cambodia’s largest conglomerates. Banks, casinos, real estate, an airline. According to US and UK authorities, he also ran a parallel network of forced-labour scam compounds across Southeast Asia. Prince Group denies the allegations and has called them baseless. Chen has not been convicted of any crime.
The theft that wasn’t a theft
In December 2020, blockchain analysts at Elliptic and Arkham later confirmed, roughly 127,000 bitcoin drained out of wallets associated with Lubian, a Chinese-Iranian mining pool that had ranked among the world’s largest for a brief window that year. At the time, the haul was worth somewhere around $3.5 billion. By the time the US Justice Department’s civil forfeiture complaint was filed in 2025, the same coins were worth more than four times that.
Lubian went dark shortly after. No press release. No public complaint to Chinese authorities. No tip to Interpol. The on-chain forensics community noticed only because the coins sat still for years, a pattern wallets holding stolen funds rarely follow.
US prosecutors now allege the coins were never stolen in the conventional sense. The indictment frames the 2020 movement as an internal transfer connected to Chen’s network, with the wallets later coming under the control of entities the DOJ argues were laundering vehicles for proceeds of forced-labour fraud. Chen’s lawyers reject this account. The civil forfeiture standard, preponderance of evidence, is lower than the criminal standard, and the government is pursuing both tracks.
Why the victim could not call the police
The logic of a silent theft only makes sense if reporting it would cost more than the loss itself. A miner operating at Lubian’s scale in 2020 was either generating coins legally and paying tax, or generating them in a jurisdiction where the entire operation was already grey-market. Mining pools tied to politically exposed individuals tend to fall in the second category. Academic work on offshore concealment patterns shows that the ultra-wealthy’s decisions to hide assets are shaped heavily by political conditions at home. The more unstable or punitive the domestic environment, the higher the propensity to conceal identity through layered jurisdictions. For an owner whose mining revenue was already invisible to tax authorities, calling the police on a $3.5 billion theft would have meant explaining where $3.5 billion came from. Silence, in that calculus, was rational. It was the only rational choice available.
What $15 billion looks like
The forfeited stash is larger than the GDP of more than 70 countries. It exceeds the 2023 annual budget of the entire US National Park Service by a factor of about five. It is roughly twice the combined value of every bitcoin the US government had previously seized in its history, from the Silk Road takedowns, the Bitfinex hack recoveries, and the smaller crypto enforcement actions that piled up across the late 2010s.
Blockchain analytics firms have documented the concentration of illicit crypto wealth among a small number of high-value wallets globally. A single forfeiture worth $15 billion suggests that the concentration is even tighter than the public numbers implied. One cluster of wallets accounted for more than half of the entire criminal-whale category.
The Brooklyn filing and the paper trail
The unsealed indictment, filed in the Eastern District of New York, lists wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy charges tied to what prosecutors describe as a transnational scheme generating proceeds through “pig butchering” investment scams run out of compounds in Cambodia and neighbouring countries. UN investigators and human-rights organisations had been reporting for years on the labour conditions inside these compounds. Passports confiscated, doors locked, daily quotas enforced through violence.
What the DOJ added was a financial spine. The forfeiture complaint traces flows from victim wallets, many belonging to retail investors in the United States who were romanced into fake crypto investment apps, through mixers, exchanges, and intermediate wallets, into the 127,271-coin cluster the government argues is controlled by Chen’s network. The tracing exercise is the part of the case worth dwelling on, because it inverts the usual order of crypto enforcement. Normally an investigation starts with a complaint, follows the money, and ends at a wallet. Here, the wallet came first. Analysts had been staring at the cluster since 2021, knowing the coins were anomalous but unable to attribute them. The attribution came from corporate filings, shared infrastructure, and the slow accumulation of intelligence about who actually controlled Lubian. The flows from retail victims into the cluster were mapped after the cluster itself was identified as suspicious. That is a different evidentiary posture, one in which the asset is the lead and the crime is reverse-engineered from it.
Silicon Canals’ investigation reveals the criminal operation behind the bitcoin seizure and how the stolen funds fueled labor trafficking networks.
Watch the full story on the Silicon Canals YouTube channel.
The US Treasury moved in parallel. OFAC sanctioned the Prince network, freezing US-touching assets and barring American persons from transacting with the designated entities. In London, the UK government froze property holdings estimated at roughly £130 million.
Then, in December 2025, Cambodia stripped Chen of his citizenship by royal decree. He had held multiple passports, Cambodian, Cypriot, and Vanuatuan among them, and carried the royal honorific Neak Oknha as a designated advisor to the Cambodian state. In January 2026, he was extradited not to the United States but to China, where the Ministry of Public Security publicly described him as the ringleader of a transnational fraud organisation.
Three governments, one defendant, zero coordination
The geometry of the case is unusual. The United States holds the money. The United Kingdom holds the London real estate. China holds the man. None of the three jurisdictions has access to all three pieces, and the legal frameworks for sharing forfeited proceeds across these particular governments are, at best, undeveloped.
For victims of the underlying pig-butchering scams, this matters. Civil forfeiture in the United States allows for restitution claims, but the process is slow and the bar for documentation is high. Victims must prove they were the source of specific funds traced into the seized wallets, a forensic exercise that few retail investors can complete without expensive counsel.
Many will not even try. Victims of large-scale financial fraud frequently disengage from recovery processes, refusing to open mail, avoiding bank statements, declining to respond to notices even when restitution is theoretically available. The shame involved in having been defrauded, particularly through a romance-based scam, tends to compound the practical barriers. A retiree who lost $400,000 to a fake crypto app cannot hold a funeral for the money. The loss often remains invisible to the people around them, which is part of why so few pursue the documentation process to its end.
The mining hack that wasn’t supposed to exist
For five years, the 127,271 bitcoin sat in wallets that on-chain analysts could see but not explain. Elliptic flagged the cluster as anomalous as early as 2021. Arkham’s later attribution work tied the wallets to Lubian and, through corporate filings and shared infrastructure, to entities the US government would eventually name in the Chen indictment.
The mining pool itself disappeared from public rankings in early 2021. Hash-rate data from that period shows Lubian going from roughly 6 per cent of the global Bitcoin hash rate to effectively zero within weeks. No bankruptcy filing. No equipment liquidation visible on secondary markets. The operation simply stopped.
Researchers who follow industrial mining infrastructure noticed that some of the hardware reappeared in other jurisdictions over the following 18 months, suggesting the physical operation was relocated rather than wound down. The coins, meanwhile, never moved until the DOJ moved them.
The exchange compliance question
The forfeiture also raises an uncomfortable question for centralised exchanges. The DOJ’s complaint traces some of the victim funds through major platforms before the consolidation into the Chen-linked wallets. The Department has not named the specific exchanges in unsealed filings, but the pattern echoes earlier enforcement actions in which compliance failures at major exchanges allowed illicit flows to move at scale.
Binance’s 2023 settlement remains the high-water mark for that kind of failure. Silicon Canals covered the moment Changpeng Zhao stepped down and pleaded guilty to money laundering charges, agreeing to a $4.3 billion penalty package. The Prince network indictment implies that even after the Binance settlement reshaped exchange compliance globally, enough seams remained for billions of dollars in pig-butchering proceeds to move through the regulated perimeter.
What the silence reveals about the model
The 2020 movement and the 2025 seizure bracket a five-year window in which a quantity of wealth larger than the market capitalisation of most public companies sat outside any formal financial system, accruing value, untouched. That this was possible at all is the part of the story most worth pausing on.
Conventional financial crime operates within a framework that assumes victims will eventually surface. Banks report. Custodians audit. Insurers subrogate. The crypto-native version of this same activity strips out every one of those reporting mechanisms. When the victim is also a perpetrator, the silence compounds. When the asset itself is portable and self-custodied, the silence can last indefinitely.
Research on institutional trust and threat response suggests that anxiety responses to systemic shocks are shaped heavily by whether populations believe the institutions designed to protect them are actually doing so. For the retail victims of the scams that fed the Chen wallets, the answer for five years was that no institution was watching. The DOJ’s filing is the first time the watching has been made visible.
What happens to $15 billion in seized coin
The US Marshals Service is the agency that typically takes custody of forfeited digital assets and arranges their disposition. Historically, that has meant auctions. The Silk Road bitcoin was sold in tranches between 2014 and 2023, with Tim Draper and other early buyers acquiring large lots well below later market prices. Selling 127,271 bitcoin into the open market would represent roughly six days of average global Bitcoin spot volume.
A bill introduced in 2024 proposed the creation of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve that would hold rather than sell seized coins. The Chen forfeiture lands inside that policy debate. If the coins are held, the United States becomes one of the largest sovereign holders of Bitcoin in the world overnight. If they are sold, the proceeds flow into the Treasury Forfeiture Fund and the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Fund, where they finance further enforcement.
Either outcome has second-order effects on the market and on the incentive structures of the agencies doing the seizing. Forfeiture funds that grow with the price of the asset they seize are an unusual budgetary instrument.
The angle the indictment doesn’t close
Chen is in Chinese custody. The 127,271 coins are in US wallets controlled by federal marshals. The London properties are frozen. The compounds described by UN investigators continue to operate, according to humanitarian organisations tracking the region, under different ownership structures.
The largest forfeiture in American history does not close the underlying business. The pig-butchering text messages keep arriving on phones in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Australia. The economics of the model, low input costs, captive labour, untraceable payouts, remain intact even with $15 billion removed from the system.
What the Brooklyn filing demonstrates is that on-chain forensics has caught up to the timeline of these operations. Coins that move in 2020 can be seized in 2025. Wallets that sit still are not safe. They are evidence. The five-year delay between the silent theft and the loud forfeiture is the new shape of crypto enforcement, and it is the part of the case that anyone holding large quantities of digital assets through opaque structures will study most carefully.
Three threads run through the Chen case, and the policy implications come from the way they intersect. The victims at the top of the chain, the original Lubian owners, could not report a $3.5 billion loss without surfacing the conditions that produced it. The victims at the bottom, the retail investors who fed the wallets through pig-butchering apps, could report, but most will not, because the psychology of financial shame works against them and the restitution machinery was not built at their scale. And the institutions in the middle, from exchanges to mutual legal-assistance treaties to forfeiture funds, were structured for a financial system in which value did not sit silently in self-custodied wallets for half a decade.
Regulation written for the next decade of crypto will have to assume that the loudest crimes are the ones nobody reports, that the most useful evidence is the asset that does not move, and that the institutions watching the chain must do so on behalf of people who cannot or will not raise their hands. The $15 billion in Brooklyn is the proof of concept. What comes next is the harder question of whether the framework around it can be rebuilt before the next silent transfer leaves the chain.
