Zheng Zhao: Extradited Over a $36.9M Pig Butchering Money Trail to Cambodia

On Friday 23 October 2026, Zheng Zhao, a 44-year-old Chinese national, stood in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles after being flown in from the Netherlands. Dutch authorities had arrested him and handed him over to the United States, and the US Department of Justice announced the extradition the same day. A judge ordered him held in custody while the case goes on.

He faces one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, filed against him in August 2025 by the US Attorney's Office for the Central District of California. If convicted, he could get up to 20 years in federal prison. He has not been convicted of anything. He is presumed innocent, and no plea or trial date had been reported as of 29 October.

Prosecutors call him a key money launderer for a fraud network run out of scam centres in Cambodia. In their account, at least 174 Americans were talked into fake investments, and at least $36.9 million of their money was moved out of the country, turned into a digital dollar and handed to the bosses of the scam centres. Zhao is the ninth person charged in the case. The other eight have pleaded guilty.

The con: pig butchering

The scam has a grim name. "Pig butchering" is a translation of Chinese criminal slang: the victim is the pig, fattened with friendship or romance before the slaughter. According to the Justice Department, the scammers reached Americans through social media, dating sites, messaging apps, text messages and phone calls. Weeks of chat built trust. Then came an investment tip.

The victims were steered to websites dressed up as real crypto trading platforms, the digital equivalent of an online broker. They wired money from their own US bank accounts and watched their balances grow on screen. The growth was fiction. The Justice Department said the scammers "would tell victims that their investments were appreciating in value" when the money had in fact already been taken.

The people doing the talking sat in compounds in Cambodia, many of them in Sihanoukville, a coastal city that became a hub for this kind of fraud. Zhao is not accused of chatting to victims. He is accused of what came after: moving the money.

The pipe, step by step

A scam centre can fake a trading website in a week. Getting American dollars out of America and into Cambodia is the hard part. The Justice Department's announcements describe the route in four steps.

First, victims sent their money to US bank accounts controlled by members of the network. Second, those accounts sent it on to a single account at Deltec Bank in the Bahamas, held in the name of a company called Axis Digital Limited. Third, according to prosecutors, the network directed Deltec to convert the dollars into USDT. USDT, also called Tether, is a stablecoin: a digital dollar issued by the company Tether that is meant to always be worth $1 and can be sent across the world in minutes, outside the normal banking system. Fourth, the USDT went to a crypto wallet controlled from Cambodia, a sort of bank account that needs no bank, and from there to the leaders of the scam centres.

Prosecutors say Zhao helped move the money into the Bahamas account and on into USDT. Several members of the network, they say, travelled between the United States and Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, to coordinate the transfers.

Neither Deltec Bank nor Tether has been accused of wrongdoing in this case. None of the Justice Department announcements or the press reports on the case allege that either company knew it was handling scam money. In the government's telling, the bank and the stablecoin were tools the network used, much as a getaway driver uses a car he did not build.

Eight guilty pleas so far

Most of the people charged have already admitted their part. The charges they pleaded to were lighter than the one Zhao faces: conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, in plain terms running a money-moving service without the licence the law requires.

ShengSheng He, of La Puente, California, co-owned Axis Digital, the company that held the Deltec account. He pleaded guilty in April 2025 and in September 2025 was sentenced to 51 months in prison and ordered to repay about $26.9 million. Jose Somarriba, of Los Angeles, received 36 months. Jingliang Su, a Chinese national, pleaded guilty in June 2025 and was sentenced in January 2026 to 46 months, with restitution of $26,867,242.44.

At Su's sentencing, Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said: "This defendant and his co-conspirators scammed 174 Americans out of their hard-earned money."

The same prosecutors' office handled the case of Daren Li, who admitted laundering at least $73.6 million for Cambodian scam centres through accounts at Deltec in the Bahamas and USDT. A Los Angeles judge sentenced Li to 20 years in February 2026, in his absence: he had cut off his ankle monitor and fled. He is still at large.

Why an arrest in the Netherlands matters

Scam centre bosses in Cambodia are mostly out of reach of US police. The people who move their money are easier to catch, because money has to pass through banks, companies and borders where records are kept. Each launderer extradited is a link in the chain that the US can put in front of a jury.

The Justice Department's Office of International Affairs worked with the Dutch authorities on the arrest and transfer. The investigation was led by the US Secret Service, which has spent years tracing pig butchering money, with help from Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection, the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service, the US Marshals Service and the Dominican National Police.

The scale behind the case is large. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report counted more than $8.6 billion lost to investment scams in 2025 across 72,984 complaints, up from $6.5 billion the year before. The 174 victims in this case are a small slice of that.