Since around 2015, Chen Zhi has served as chairman of the Cambodia-based Prince Group, a conglomerate officially engaged in legal sectors such as real estate development, banking, and consumer services, with operations in over 30 countries.

However, the indictment reveals that Chen and his top executives secretly transformed Prince Group into one of the largest transnational criminal organizations in Asia.

Under Chen’s leadership, vast profits were made through forced labor compounds in Cambodia, where workers carried out fraudulent cryptocurrency investment schemes and other forms of scam operations. These illicit earnings were then laundered through a web of fake legitimate businesses, defrauding victims in the U.S. and around the world of billions of dollars.

A facade of legitimacy hiding a massive criminal machine

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Chen Zhi

As the founder and chairman of Prince Group, Chen Zhi built a public image around core business units such as Prince Real Estate Group, Prince Huan Yu Real Estate Group, Prince Bank, and Awesome Global Investment Group. These businesses claimed to operate in real estate, banking, finance, tourism, logistics, and technology.

In reality, Prince Group’s largest profits came from illicit and fraudulent activities coordinated by Chen and a close circle of senior executives, identified in the indictment as Co-Conspirators 1 through 7.

In the summer of 2022, Co-Conspirator 2 even bragged that Prince Group had made over $30 million per day in 2018 from “pig butchering” scams and other illegal activities.

Each building and floor had a designated scam type

Prince Group rose to dominate Cambodia’s online fraud empire. Thousands of migrant workers were trafficked and forced to labor in heavily guarded compounds under the threat of violence.

These compounds were described as massive dormitories, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, functioning as brutal forced labor sites. Under Chen’s direction, Prince Group constructed and operated at least 10 scam compounds across Cambodia, including:

The Jinbei Compound linked to a hotel and casino in Sihanoukville
The Golden Fortune Science and Technology Park (also called Jinyun Compound) in Chrey Thom
The Mango Park (or Jinhong Park) in Kampong Speu Province

The indictment details how Chen not only oversaw but personally managed these scam facilities and kept records of their operations, further exposing the criminal nature of Prince Group. Internal logs tracked profits from specific scam campaigns, with keywords like “sha zhu” – Mandarin for “pig butchering” – repeatedly appearing.

A particularly damning accounting ledger kept by Chen detailed various fraudulent schemes conducted at the Jinhong Park facility, identifying which building and even which floor was responsible for each type of scam.

The list of schemes revealed a diverse targeting strategy, including:

“Vietnamese order fraud”
“Russian order fraud”
“European and American jingliao” (scripted romance/chat scams targeting victims in the EU and US)
Variants of jingliao targeting Vietnamese, Chinese, and Taiwanese victims
“Chinese brush order” (a form of e-commerce fraud)

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Each floor at Jinhong Park was responsible for a specific scam. Source: U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York

Chen and his co-conspirators meticulously designed these compounds for maximum profit, ensuring the infrastructure allowed access to as many victims as possible.

Around 2018, Co-Conspirator 1 was involved in purchasing millions of phone numbers and account credentials from an illegal dark web marketplace. Chen himself kept documents outlining “phone farms” – mass-operated systems for spamming and scamming victims using thousands of devices.

These documents detailed the completion of two separate facilities, each equipped with 1,250 mobile phones used to control 76,000 accounts on a popular social media platform. Internal guidelines advised operators to select profile photos of women who were “not too attractive” to appear more believable when grooming victims for scams.

A tech-savvy criminal empire disguised as charity and business

The indictment from the US District Court laid bare the structure of one of Asia’s largest criminal organizations, exposing how legal business fronts, violent forced labor, and high-tech scams were intertwined to steal billions globally.

This evidence not only exposes the crimes of Chen Zhi and the Prince Group but also highlights the growing danger of online scam networks targeting vulnerable victims - especially in countries like Vietnam.

While the indictment does not specify financial damages to Vietnamese citizens, the 2024 National Cybersecurity Annual Report issued by the Vietnam National Cybersecurity Association revealed widespread online fraud in Vietnam, with devastating consequences for hundreds of thousands of victims.

Based on a survey of nearly 60,000 respondents conducted between November 28 and December 14, roughly 1 in every 220 users reported being scammed online - a rate of 0.45%.

The total losses from online fraud in Vietnam in 2024 were estimated at 18.9 trillion VND, or roughly $745 million USD.

Du Lam