Wow. $15 billion is an astronomical, nearly unfathomable amount of money in Cambodia. This must have been a huge operation. It's almost 1/3 of the country's entire GDP!
Well done DOJ. Hopefully the victims get their money back.
Well done DOJ. Hopefully the victims get their money back.
The DOJ adds seized crypto to the American crypto reserve. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...
From the webpage: " The Executive Order begins to resolve the current disjointed handling of cryptocurrencies seized through forfeiture by, and scattered across, various Federal agencies. Currently, no clear policy exists for managing these assets, leading to a lack of accountability and inadequate exploration of options to centralize, secure, or maximize their value. Taking affirmative steps to centralize ownership, control, and management of these assets within the Federal government will ensure proper oversight, accurate tracking, and a cohesive approach to managing the government’s cryptocurrency holdings. This move harnesses the power of digital assets for national prosperity, rather than letting them languish in limbo. "
It's not like a cambodian pig butchering operation is going to keep detailed ledgers of who they scammed and for how much.
That’s not actually correct. The blockchain contains a permanent, immutable, and public record of every transaction.
Obviously you also need a way to connect a given wallet ID (address) back to it’s owner, but if transactions originated from regulated platforms like Binance then they will have those records thanks to KYC/AML rules.
If the transaction originated from a private wallet, a fraud victim could simply submit proof of their wallet ID as part of their claim.
There's areas in Laos and Cambodia they control where it literally operates under a different set of laws. One of the areas, I think in Laos, Americans aren't even allowed to enter
In the case of Myanmar, I think their biggest problem is the country has been in a war for decades with loads of various factions and it's too chaotic for any government to attempt to get anything under control.
And bordering countries like Thailand are running into issues where people are getting trafficked through Thailand to these other countries. So it's actually ruining the reputation of Thailand and lots of Chinese people are wary of traveling to Thailand because of it
To provide a bit more context what happens is Chinese people will give fake job offers to their fellow Chinese and then basically kidnap them when they arrive to Thailand and take them to another country to work in a scam center
So yea, there are massive amounts of money involved.
[0]https://www.searchengine.show/whos-behind-these-scammy-text-...
Wouldn't surprise me, if the DOJ had some "under-the-table" help from Chinese sources, but not in any way that anyone can prove.
If you don't want to sign up for a podcast, John Oliver did a fairly decent bit about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg
Really poor financial management to have all that money concentrated that much though. It either means they dropped the ball bigly, or this is spare change for them... although Bitcoin's market cap is $2.24 trillion at the moment, $15 billion is a significant chunk of that.
I bet somebody wrote down their password, too scared of what would happen to them if they were to forget it.
Trying to liquidate $15bn to USD reasonably quickly would very likely cause a massive drop the price, which would correspondingly drop the market cap by potentially many times that $15bn.
Literally about 0.67%.
I wouldn't call that significant.
Cambodia is just a proxy, a land where the Chinese gangs act with impunity. Earned with slave work, money is laundered in casinos and no Cambodian is seeing a cent of it.
Might as well say "nearly unfathomable amount of money in Congo" because that's just how disconnected the money is to the country.
And BTW it is not just the Chinese, there are innumerable other operators, including a whole bunch of smaller 'startups'.
They operate because Cambodia openly accepts it, and takes a cut, not because they are somehow so clever as to disguise the real business being conducted in closed-up apartment blocks.
$15 billion is a huge number to be sure, but it's unclear from the article how many years it took to acquire.
I heard an agent got court for opening bank accounts for them in Pattaya, over 500 accounts. We have had crackdowns on banking here in Thailand ever since.
1. The feds can't take your money.
2. Once your money's gone, it's gone.
If criminals can't count on #1 holding true, and their victims can't count on #2 holding true, what is even the point of it?
There's no thing that the feds can't have because they have an infinite amount of sanctions violence and tools at their disposal to make anyone do what they want, one way or another.
>were previously stored in unhosted cryptocurrency wallets whose private keys the defendant had in his possession. Those funds (the Defendant Cryptocurrency) are presently in the custody of the U.S. government.
It's not even new - Bitcoin right from the start was explicitly created to replace a centralized system used by criminals to evade currency controls. Bitcoin's creator(s?) saw that the various governments were eventually able to shut that down and set up Bitcoin as a decentralized system to avoid that problem.
It's not a flaw in crypto that criminals flock to it - it is built into the very design. This story shows that it is not perfect but to criminals it is the best that they have.
More information as the mystery deepens, it's not proceeds from just the pig butchering
https://www.elliptic.co/blog/15-billion-us-seizure-reveals-p...
Admittedly it's doubtful whether this kind of activity would be captured by official statistics.
I know it’s a bit of a get out clause but it’s at least not obvious to me that this wouldn’t contribute, certainly the illegal nature is not a blocker for being counted in GDP.
And should their state sponsored criminal activities count for North Korean GDP for example?
How about cash it out and trickle it down to us... or is all that just gonna magically disappear?
Unless this went through a mixer, Bitcoin is quite transparent.
Still easier to just transfer it all to the Treasury of course and screw the victims which is probably what will happen.
Based on current judicial trends, they’ll probably get Coinbase coupons worth 50% of a different coin or something.
Why? Most of them didn't care about bitcoin, they bought it solely to give to the scammer.
After all, if someone stole $1k of gold from someone a decade ago, is giving them (now deflated) $1k USD fair, or is giving them the same physical amount (now worth) $3k in gold fairer? Even if they bought the gold because the scammer asked them too.
The ‘fair enough’ treatment would be to give them the dollar equivalent at the time they gave the bitcoin to the scammer, and the rest goes… to the gov’t? As ‘payment’ for recovering it all and making the payment happen? Or to penalize the scammers? But actually the victims lost a lot of monetary value due to inflation, and lost gains from bitcoin price increasing.
The ‘meh, won’t get anyone run out of town with pitchforks’ is the gov’t seizes the bitcoin, punishes the offenders (how?), and somehow gives warm fuzzies to the victims without actually giving them anything to make their financial pain any better. Aka business as usual. Bonus points if you make them give more money to another party to do it (aka the ‘class action shuffle’ that has gotten popular in the last few decades).
I think that's an important difference. The fair thing is to "make them whole", to restore them to as if they'd never met the scammer. If they had a stash of gold that got stolen, the fair thing is to give them back that gold or the nearest equivalent. If they had a bunch of money that they sent to the scammer, the fair thing is to give them their money back; if they bought $50k in iTunes gift cards to send to the scammer we should be giving them back $50k, not 5,000,000 iTunes points. I don't see how that's any different for Bitcoin.
Sure, and some legal regimes will apply a statutory interest rate to try to make up for that.
* It's not as simple as sending the transaction back to the previous holder
* With some basic detective work the paper trails exist to find many of the victims and verify the amount that was lost.