Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice completed a global law enforcement operation that succeeded in destroying a multinational criminal group, the Prince Group, and confiscated 12,7 thousand bitcoins held in Cambodia.

The total value of these bitcoins amounts to $15 billion, which is approximately RMB 107 billion.

This case not only unveils the deep interweaving of cryptocurrencies with criminal networks, but also marks a new phase in the global fight against cybercrime.

Chen Zhi, founder of Taizi Group, is a Fujian businessman. As early as 2009, he began to lay out in Cambodia and gradually expanded his sphere of influence by establishing contacts with local power centers.

In 2017, he co-founded the Kimbe Group in collaboration with the son of the Cambodian Minister of Internal Affairs and earned titles such as Counselor of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Counselor of Prime Minister Hunson. These political relations provided a powerful umbrella for the Prince Group, leading to the rapid expansion of its criminal network.

On the surface, the Prince Group is a multinational company involving real estate, finance and consumer services, operating in 30 countries. In fact, it is a criminal group that combines tech fraud, political infiltration and violent enslavement.

Its core business is ¡°killing pork¡± scams, which combine fraud technology with violent slavery through industrial flow lines.

In the group¡¯s parks, workers are forced to operate mobile phone farms and use tens of thousands of social accounts worldwide to search for scammers.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Prince Group's business focus shifted online, and cryptocurrency became its key tool for money laundering.

The decentralized nature of Bitcoin has made cross-border money transfers more secretive, while avoiding the censorship of traditional financial regulatory systems. Chen Zhi has even sold 24,000 Bitcoins at a time, holding approximately $2.7 billion.

However, Prince Prince Group's superstition about the anonymity of cryptocurrencies eventually became its Achilles heel. Although Bitcoin transactions are decentralized, blockchain ledgers are open and transparent. It is by tracking transaction records on the blockchain that US and British law enforcement agencies have locked in the Prince Group's huge cryptographic assets.

In order to gain control of Bitcoin, American and British investigators sent undercover agents to infiltrate the organization and finally successfully obtained the private keys of these assets. This action completely destroyed the economic foundation of the Prince Group.

In addition, US and British law enforcement also frozen 19 properties of Chen Zhi in London, with a total value of about 130 million pounds. Prince Group's economic network suffered heavy losses, and the entire organization was instantly paralyzed.

In fact, as early as 2019, the Chinese and Cambodian police jointly operated to arrest 1,000 Chinese suspects and issued the ¡°818 Gambling Ban Order¡±, which led to about 44,7,000 Chinese people leaving Cambodia.

However, these actions failed to reach the core economic and political foundations of the Prince Group. The criminal group then moved to northern Myanmar and Dubai to continue to carry out cryptocurrency fraud activities.

The joint action of the United States and Britain adopted a completely different strategy, directly hitting the financial core of Prince Group.

This "surgical" law enforcement method marks a new stage in the global fight against cybercrime.

In parts of Southeast Asia, where the vacuum is governed, the activity of transnational crime groups is growing, and remote law enforcement by powerful powers through financial and judicial powers is becoming an important tool to solve this problem.