How a $20 Billion Crypto Scam Network Survived Four Government Crackdowns

Hundreds of people sat at desks running romance scams around the clock somewhere inside a compound in Cambodia, its perimeter fenced with barbed wire and its employees unable to leave. Some were involved in human trafficking. Some were trapped after responding to job advertisements that promised respectable employment. Each was given a certain number of victims to develop, profiles to keep up, and cryptocurrency sites to direct newcomers to. They were advised not to use profile pictures of women who are “too beautiful,” as the accounts must appear authentic, according to the operation’s rapport-building advice. What sticks with you is the industrial logic of it all. This was not an improvised crime. It was in charge.
An estimated $20 billion was processed over about ten years by the network behind those compounds, which was centered on Cambodia’s Prince Group and its chairman Chen Zhi, who was accused of running what U.S. prosecutors described as a “sprawling cyber-fraud empire” after allegedly serving as a personal advisor to the country’s prime minister. It withstood four distinct waves of government intervention. It persisted after a previous black market was shut down. After Binance entered a guilty plea to money laundering charges, it continued to expand. After the platform deleted its accounts, it restored its Telegram presence. The network’s main marketplace, Xinbi Guarantee, had launched its own payment app and an estimated 175,000 subscribers in a single channel by the time UK authorities imposed broad sanctions on it in March 2026.
The tale of how Xinbi and the larger Prince Group operation managed to endure for so long is fundamentally about three factors coming together: local political protection, exchange-level regulatory failure, and a criminal infrastructure that was purposefully constructed to withstand punishment and continue operating. The network becomes much more vulnerable if any one of those three are removed. For years, all three continued to exist at the same time.

Chen Zhi’s purported ties to Cambodian political elites were fundamental to his business, not incidental. U.S. prosecutors claim that bribes to local officials made it possible for the compounds housing thousands of workers behind tall walls to function without significant interference. Following the U.S.-UK action in October 2025, Cambodia was making an effort to dismantle scam centers in the region, but for years prior to that, the political climate was permissive enough to allow the operation to grow. Ten fraudulent companies. 76,000 social media accounts and phone farms. A Picasso bought at an auction house in New York City. private aircraft. These weren’t purchases made by a criminal attempting to remain silent.
The exchange issue comes next. At least $408 million in tether from Huione Group, a financial company that the U.S. Treasury Department would later designate as a primary money laundering concern, entered Binance customer accounts between November 2023 and mid-2025, when Binance entered a guilty plea to money laundering violations. Over a comparable time period, Huione gave at least $226 million to OKX, which entered its own guilty plea in February 2025. For the majority of this period, compliance monitors appointed by the court were in place at both exchanges. Nevertheless, the dirty money moved. The outcome was the same regardless of whether this is the result of intentional neglect, organizational dysfunction, or just the impossibility of compliance at trillion-dollar transaction volumes.
The workload, according to former compliance employees at large exchanges, is just too much to handle. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists was informed by a former Binance analyst that his team spent time looking into $2 or $3 transactions. According to a former OKX analyst, volume was prioritized over rigor when processing alerts in a matter of minutes. “For crypto, the customers are abundant, so they want quantity over quality,” she stated. Court monitors watched from a distance as hundreds of millions in scam proceeds circulated through well-known platforms due to this culture, which is ingrained in the economics of an industry where compliance generates no revenue.
This story’s victims are real people. Over the course of three and a half years, Asako Nishizaki, a 68-year-old Tokyo resident, sent money to a man she met on Match.com who identified himself as Milan Novak, claimed to be Croatian, and asked for financial assistance. She lost her condo, more than $74,000, and, for a while, her relationship with her two sons. A 67-year-old man from Albany, New York, lost over $150,000 to a woman he met on Facebook. He cashed out his IRA to invest in a platform she suggested, and within a day, his money vanished into an OKX deposit wallet. When a Canadian woman outside of Calgary reported that she had lost her life savings of over $25,000 to a task scam, she was informed that she would not receive her money back. The case is currently in a filing cabinet, according to her most recent update.
Elliptic, a crypto-tracing company, claims that the UK sanctions imposed in March 2026 are the kind of action that will make it more difficult for Xinbi to exchange or spend its cryptocurrency within the legal financial system. A penthouse in London worth £9 million was confiscated. The sanctions are being characterized as a first-of-its-kind measure aimed at a black market of this magnitude based on Telegram. It’s genuinely unclear if that will ultimately be a sufficiently harsh blow. After Telegram deleted it, the network was rebuilt. It started using its own payment system. While governments issued warnings, levied fines, and kept an eye on compliance, it processed close to $20 billion.
As all of this has been going on for years, there is a sense that while the tools available to law enforcement—such as asset seizures, guilty pleas, and sanctions—are real, they are all a little too slow and limited for what they are pursuing. By design, the scam infrastructure is decentralized. U.S. prosecutors have pointed out that the money-laundering network functions independently of the compound network. It is not a given that cracking one will also crack the other. One stolen life savings at a time, the victims, dispersed throughout forty countries and frequently too embarrassed or overburdened to report, continue to quietly absorb the damage.