Prince Group: Cambodia Freezes Nearly $1 Billion and Seeks 29 Fugitives

For years the Prince Group's name hung over a bank, casinos and office towers across Cambodia. Behind some of those walls, US prosecutors allege, trafficked workers slept in dormitories ringed with barbed wire and spent their shifts typing friendly messages to strangers they had been ordered to rob. On Wednesday 21 October 2026 the Cambodian government said its courts had frozen nearly $1 billion of what the group owns.

The figure came from Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, who heads the secretariat of Cambodia's Commission for Combating Technology-enabled Scams (CCTC), in an interview with the Phnom Penh Post. The freeze covers buildings, casinos, thousands of properties and other assets, among them more than $300 million held in bank accounts. Investigators have tied 198 companies to the group: 98 registered in Cambodia and 100 operating abroad. Courts have issued arrest warrants for 32 people and placed four more under judicial supervision, a release on conditions set by a judge. Cambodia has started asking Interpol for red notices for at least 29 suspects who have left the country.

The suspected crimes are aggravated fraud by an organised group and aggravated money laundering. Chhay Sinarith said the group used buildings and casinos registered to its companies to hide online scam operations, and that Cambodia is sharing evidence with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and China's Ministry of Public Security. Everyone named is accused, not convicted. Prince Group, formally Prince Holding Group, has called the US and UK allegations against it "baseless", and no public response from it to the Cambodian freeze had been reported by 24 October.

The crackdown reaches well beyond one company. Between July 2025 and the end of September 2026, the minister said, Cambodia inspected 910 suspected scam sites, charged 5,778 people and sent home 22,892 foreigners from 40 countries who were found at them. Many, he said, had been deceived or lured there by criminal gangs; others had broken immigration law.

What the compounds were for

The business US prosecutors describe is pig butchering, from the Chinese phrase sha zhu pan: fatten the pig before the slaughter. A stranger makes contact by text, social media or a dating app and, over weeks, becomes a friend or a romantic partner. Then comes a tip about a crypto trading platform. The platform is fake. It looks like an online brokerage account and shows growing profits, but every deposit goes to the scammers, and the victim keeps paying in until the savings are gone.

In October 2025 the US Justice Department charged Chen Zhi, the group's founder and chairman, in federal court in Brooklyn with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. Prosecutors allege he was directly involved in managing the compounds, kept ledgers of which scams ran from which rooms and held photographs of beatings and torture. They say he wrote to subordinates about beating people who "caused trouble", in one case specifying that they should not be "beaten to death." The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) later found that one photo in the indictment, of a man tied to an overturned chair, appeared to have nothing to do with the group. A Prince Group spokesperson told ICIJ the indictment was "air cover for a giant cash grab."

Who is under arrest, and where Chen Zhi is

Chhay Sinarith named six alleged ringleaders as arrested and sent to the courts: Chen Zhi, Li Song, Liu Yin, Eng Dara, Eang Soklim and Huang Ron. He did not say when the five besides Chen were detained or what roles they held at the group.

Chen Zhi is not in a Cambodian cell. Cambodia stripped him of his citizenship in December 2025, arrested him on 6 January 2026 with two other Chinese nationals and sent all three to China at Beijing's request. On 8 January China's state broadcaster CCTV showed him being led off a plane at a Beijing airport in handcuffs and a black hood. The business magazine Caixin reported that he was formally arrested in China on 6 July, suspected of fraud, running illegal casinos and illegal business operations, with copyright infringement and intentional injury added. In its gravest form, intentional injury can carry the death penalty in China. No trial date has been reported, and the minister did not say how a Cambodian court would deal with a defendant held in China.

The 29 who left are the reason for the Interpol requests. A red notice is Interpol's worldwide wanted alert: it asks police in its 196 member countries to find a person and hold them while extradition is arranged. It is not an arrest warrant, and each country decides whether to act on it.

Frozen is not confiscated

A court freeze works like a lock on a brokerage account. Nothing in it can be sold, moved or borrowed against, but the owner has not changed. Confiscation is a court's final ruling that the state now owns it. Chhay Sinarith said Cambodia is still weighing whether to put the frozen properties under temporary state management or transfer them permanently to the state, and that any permanent seizure depends on judicial review and the outcome of the case.

The government has said where it wants the money to go. In April Justice Minister Koeut Rith said Chen Zhi's assets would be "confiscated and incorporated into the national budget." In January the National Bank of Cambodia put Prince Bank, the lender Chen founded, into liquidation. The minister's October account did not say whether any of the frozen money would reach people who were scammed.

The money trail through Taiwan

A day before the Cambodian announcement, on 20 October, investigators from Taiwan's Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau laid out the group's laundering route at a seminar in Ottawa hosted by Harry Tseng, Taiwan's representative to Canada, according to the Canadian outlet The Bureau. Taiwan's financial intelligence unit had been following Prince Group money since late 2019, and banks filed 153 suspicious transaction reports in the 20 days after the US and UK sanctions alone. The bureau put the money laundered through Taiwan at about $343 million.

Most of that was already in court. On 4 March 2026 Taipei prosecutors indicted 62 people and 13 companies, Chen among them, over about NT$10.79 billion (roughly $341 million) laundered through online gambling, underground money transfers, shell companies, sports cars and property. More than NT$5.5 billion (about $174 million) in assets has been seized, and prosecutors asked for the maximum 13-year sentence for Chen.

One tool was OJBK Wallet, a wallet the group built itself, prosecutors say, to move crypto into Taiwan. Its job was to turn USDT into cash. USDT is a stablecoin, a digital dollar issued by the company Tether and meant to be worth exactly $1, which moves across borders like a bank transfer without a bank. According to the Ottawa presentation, a customer photographed a banknote's serial number and a courier checked the matching note before handing over the money. Some property was bought with cash and mortgaged at once, so that dirty cash became a clean bank loan. "The illegal cash disappeared," Special Agent Pei Lin told the seminar. "A liquid bank loan appeared in its place."

The wider case

The largest prize is still in the United States. Prosecutors are asking a federal judge in Brooklyn, Rachel Kovner, to hand the government about 127,271 bitcoin, worth roughly $15 billion when the case was filed, which they say came from wallets Chen controlled and which are already in US custody. Claimants including Chen, Prince Holding Group and a bitcoin mining pool called LuBian say the coins are theirs. The US Treasury and the UK sanctioned 146 people and companies tied to the group in October 2025, and the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added nine people and 26 entities on 23 June 2026. Hong Kong and Singapore have frozen or seized about $354 million and $116 million.

©CMZ chart. Data: Phnom Penh Post, Reuters, Taiwan News (CNA), US Justice Department

On 8 October the US State Department kept Cambodia in Tier 3, the lowest ranking in its annual Trafficking in Persons Report, saying some senior officials and advisers "financially benefitted from the trafficking of victims in scam centres and interfered to protect scam centre operations." Interior Ministry spokesman Touch Sokhak pointed to the country's raids, deportations and prosecutions. The Prince Group announcement came 13 days later.