Daren Li: He Cut Off His Ankle Monitor, Then Got 20 Years for $73M

On 9 February 2026, in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles, Judge R. Gary Klausner sentenced Daren Li to 20 years in prison. Li was not there to hear it. Weeks earlier he had cut off the electronic monitor strapped to his ankle and disappeared.

Li, 42, holds Chinese and St Kitts and Nevis passports, and he had already admitted the crime. In November 2024 he pleaded guilty to conspiring to launder money stolen from Americans by "pig butchering" scams run from scam centres in Cambodia. His plea agreement put the total at no less than $73.6 million, of which at least $59.8 million passed through American shell companies: businesses that existed on paper for one purpose, to own bank accounts.

Twenty years is the legal maximum for the charge, and it is far more than his own prosecutors had asked for. In a filing dated 22 December 2025, the US Attorney's Office for the Central District of California recommended 63 months. The court's probation office had calculated a guidelines range of 188 to 235 months. Judge Klausner went past both. The US Department of Justice announced the sentence the same day and promised to work with partners abroad to bring Li back. In April 2026 the State Department put a reward of up to $4 million on him. He is still at large.

What pig butchering is

The name is a translation of Chinese scam slang. The victim is the pig, fattened with attention before the slaughter. It starts with a wrong-number text, a dating-app match or a friendly stranger on WhatsApp. Weeks of chat build a friendship or a romance. Then the new friend mentions the money they have been making trading crypto, and offers to show how.

One victim, a man in New Jersey described in the Secret Service affidavit that led to Li's arrest, followed the script to the letter. In May 2022 a woman calling herself "Angela" messaged him on WhatsApp, moved the conversation to the encrypted app Telegram and sent screenshots of her trading profits. She gave him a link to what looked like CoinZoom, a real crypto trading service. The address was coinzooma.com, one letter off. Between July and August 2022 he put in about $1.5 million and watched his balance climb on a screen that was entirely fake. When he asked to withdraw, the site's "customer service" told him to pay taxes and fees first. That was when he understood.

Other victims got a variant: a fake tech-support call about a computer virus that did not exist, followed by instructions to wire money to fix it. Prosecutors say the people doing the talking were unknown co-conspirators working overseas, not Li or anyone charged in the case. Li's work began after the money left the victim's bank.

How the money moved

A scam centre can fake a trading website. Getting American dollars out of America is harder, and that is what networks like Li's were for. Court filings describe four layers.

First, victims were told to wire their money to US bank accounts, at banks including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, opened in the names of shell companies. The Secret Service traced victim payments to about 74 of them, with names such as CMD Export and Import, KQQ Kitchen Appliance Wholesale and Kais Tea Set Supplies. CMD was registered to a house in Los Angeles County with a stated business of "trading import and export". It traded nothing. Together the shell accounts took in more than $80 million.

Second, money mules in and around Los Angeles ran those accounts. They deposited cheques, rang the banks to chase transfers and kept the money moving.

Third, almost all of it went to two accounts at Deltec Bank & Trust in the Bahamas. There it was converted into Tether, known as USDT, a stablecoin: a digital dollar that always trades at $1 and can be sent anywhere in minutes, outside the banking system.

Fourth, the USDT went to crypto wallets, which work like bank accounts that need no bank, controlled overseas by people including Li. They passed it on to the bosses of the scam centres in Cambodia.

Li sat at the point where dollars became untraceable. Investigators found that a wallet ending "Daax6", which Li had access to, received and sent on about $341 million. A personal account at Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange (a broker for digital coins), opened in his own name with his own passport, received 4.5 million USDT of victim money and forwarded all of it within days.

He also helped build the pipe. One of the Bahamas accounts was opened by a Los Angeles man who had to show the bank he had money. On 8 June 2022 Li sent him 999,383 USDT. The man screenshotted his suddenly rich Binance.US account for the bank's paperwork and sent the money back to Li over the next two days. Before that, his account had held less than $100.

How they found him

The trail began with someone else's phone. In December 2023 a grand jury indicted four people who handled the Los Angeles end of the network, and Secret Service agents seized an iPhone 13 belonging to one of them. On it were Telegram chats with a laundering syndicate whose members put "KG" in their usernames and used a logo reading "KG Pay". One participant, user "KG71777", saved in the phone as "KK", gave instructions on where victim money should go and how to deposit cheques. In one September 2023 chat he showed he knew the police were looking for one of the launderers.

Agents tied KK to Li, partly through internet connection records: the IP address used to log into his Binance account was the same one used, in the same weeks, to log into an account at the payments firm Wise that received victim money.

Li was arrested on 12 April 2024 at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and transferred to Los Angeles, where a magistrate ordered him held without bail. A month later a co-defendant, Yicheng Zhang of Temple City, California, was arrested in Los Angeles. Both were charged with conspiracy to launder money and six counts of international money laundering.

Twenty years, in absentia

Li pleaded guilty on 12 November 2024 to the conspiracy count; the other six counts were later dropped. He admitted directing others to open shell company accounts, watching the wires arrive and overseeing the conversion into USDT.

©CMZ chart. Data: US Department of Justice, court records

By July 2025, court records show, a bond secured against property had been filed and Li was out of jail under release conditions that included an ankle monitor. In December 2025 he removed the monitor and fled. Sentencing went ahead without him on 9 February 2026: 240 months in federal prison, three years of supervised release, a money judgment of forfeiture, and restitution to be set at a later hearing. Prosecutors have asked for $28,372,884.44, the losses that victims reported and that the government could trace into the two Bahamas accounts.

Getting that money back is another matter. Because the funds were wired abroad, turned into USDT and scattered across dozens of private wallets, prosecutors told the court that "the government was not able to freeze, seize, or recover any of the direct victim proceeds." Some of the victims, they wrote, lost their entire life savings. Bill Essayli, the First Assistant US Attorney in Los Angeles, used the announcement to urge the public "to not talk to strangers", especially ones asking for money online.