Seems organised crime is taking advantage of less-policed (or lawless) regions in Cambodia and Burma.
The spectre of a similar scam has resulted in lower Chinese tourism to Thailand. Basically Chinese (among other nationalities) tourists were led from the airport by fake immigration staff, put into cars and driven to Burma and forced to work 18 hour days in scam call centers.
I got a lot less snarky in my responses to scam text messages when I learned about the forced labor aspect. I just block the sender and go on, versus trying to bait them and waste their time.
I don't understand this logic. If someone is robbing you because they are being forced to do it they are still committing a crime and are worthy of the full force of the law, and the ire of the public.
You bait and waste time to save less aware people from being scammed. This is a multi-billion dollar industry that prays of the most vulnerable in our society. In America, we are the number one target of scammers of all kinds. These scammers are sick people. Full stop. To allow your morals to be compromised to the point you would scam a pensioner out of probably the only money they have to live is disgusting. I can't even in the deepest parts of my heart find a single nanogram of sympathy. 30 years in prison wouldn't be enough for these types of people.
I personally have no sympathy for these people whether or not they're victims. You get a choice in life to stand on your morals or allow them to be eroded. If you choose to do something you know is wrong then you are no better than any other person who knowingly commits such acts. Therefore, these scammers deserve severe prison sentences no different than any other. "Just doing my job" hasn't worked since Nuremberg and it shouldn't work now.
To what extreme do you take this? Would you rather be killed than scam someone? That’s a principled stance if so, but I’d personally rather you try to scam me if the alternative is you being beaten up, or worse
> I personally have no sympathy for these people whether or not they're victims
That’s an interesting moral philosophy. Do you think that no one ever deserves sympathy for something they were forced to do? If a Mexican drug cartel threatens to kill someone’s entire family if they don’t perform a reprehensible act, no one should feel the tiniest bit bad for them if they don’t stand on principle?
I assume you don’t actually think that, but when you hear that people are being kidnapped, trafficked abroad, and forced to work in clandestine Burmese call centers, what do you think their options are?
The freer you are, the easier it is to stand on principle. When your life or your freedom is at stake, you will do things that you never thought possible. We are genetically programmed to preserve our own lives, as well as those of our loved ones, at just about any cost.
>I personally have no sympathy for these people whether or not they're victims. You get a choice in life to stand on your morals or allow them to be eroded. If you choose to do something you know is wrong then you are no better than any other person who knowingly commits such acts.
That's nice, but if someone points a weapon at me and tells me to rob people over the phone i'll probably do it.
also this isn't a "lawless" region that OP is talking about they are in city centers in Cambodia and the Cambodian police and government officials are all getting paid off to let them operate freely.
it really is disgusting to see this level of corruption and that its going to have long term economic impact on Cambodia and Cambodians abroad.
Spent significant time in Vietnam & Cambodia & Thailand. Cambodia is a sad country full of desperate people. "less-policed" is the entire country. ~50 years since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide.
Vietnam was by far my favorite of the three and the contrast between the three countries is stark.
Content:
"Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević."
I had to read up, and...my goodness.
Apparently the US bombed a neutral Cambodia secretly to incite Vietnam's neighboring countries and put pressure on them, killing 30k to 150k civilians.
This caused unrest, and gave way to Khmer Rouge to sieze power, using "defense against the US" as propoganda.
And we dropped more bombs on poor Laos (mostly because pilots weren't supposed to land back at base with bombs still on board) than on Japan and Germany combined... they estimate it will take about 600 years to removed all the unexploded cluster bombs and children regurly get maimed and killed by them (they look like tennis balls).
The Chin, Hmong, and Lao are some of the nicest people you will ever meet, too.
It's a giant mess. I don't think Pot would have gained the support/power that he did without the US indiscriminate bombing. Much like the creation of ISIS and the strengthening of the Taliban in Afghanistan, it turns out people don't like the people dropping bombs on them. They'll turn to whoever is fighting the bombers.
The US involvement in Vietnam would have already been over before the uprising of Pot had Nixon and Kissinger not skuttled peace talks to help Nixon get elected.
I know I'm wonderful at parties but I catch so much shit, here but not especially, when I point out the incredible wrongs and the sheer body count of America's colonialist projects here into the modern day.
It really cannot be overstated. The developing world is still developing thanks to it's own institutional issues, to be sure, as everywhere else on the globe struggles with, but America has never had a larger, stronger America come in and just fuck it right up for literally no reason apart from larger geopolitical games.
The Cambodian civil war only ended in 1991. To call a country full of any type of people is the definition of racism. YC news moderation standards is quite something these days. For actual foreigners’ opinions of Cambodia after having lived there long term, watch this YouTuber’s videos:
Austin Tukwa
@austintukwa https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhN9L6mXjPI
How does calling a country full of people who are sad and desperate for a better life discriminate against them? This is the same kind of rhetoric I would hear someone use as an appeal to helping them. Hearing about these things makes me more kind and empathetic to the people involved - not less. It feels like you are trying to do a good intentioned thing here but maybe it’s misaligned to more malicious folks compare with how most people read these comments
Negative stereotyping of a whole group is racism because it promotes discrimination or hatred toward that group. Positive stereotypes are not racism under this definition because they do not promote discrimination or hatred.
On "poor" vs. "desperate": these are different negative stereotypes that get mixed up.
"Poor" is a financial state (a lack of money). The most common negative stereotype is that people in poverty are unmotivated or lazy, which wrongly attaches character flaws to an economic condition. A person can be poor and still have dignity, hope, and resourcefulness.
"Desperate" is an emotional state of hopelessness that can lead to reckless action. The stereotype suggests weakness or manipulativeness. A person can be financially well-off but feel desperate due to a health crisis, relationship failure, etc.
Conflating them is wrong because one can be poor but not desperate, and one can be desperate but not poor.
> Saying we can’t negatively stereotype basically says you can only have positive opinions about this country
This logical fallacy is a False Dichotomy (also known as a False Dilemma or Black-and-White Fallacy).
This fallacy occurs when an argument incorrectly presents two opposing options as the only possibilities, when in fact a wide range of other options exist.
How it applies to the statement:
The statement "Saying we can’t negatively stereotype basically says you can only have positive opinions about this country" creates a false choice between:
Option A: Engaging in negative stereotypes.
Option B: Only having positive opinions.
This completely ignores the vast and reasonable middle ground, which is legitimate, specific criticism.
Yes, I agree the US is an a great country. The US culture is still the most influential in the world. Everyone loves American foods, movies, and consumer products.
Cambodians love American culture. Young Cambodians are desperate to see new American movies, try American foods, and get their hands on new Apple products. They love Facebook. The majority of Cambodians favor the US over China:
https://www.statista.com/chart/32058/preference-for-us-china...
Interestingly, the majority of Thais favor China over the US. The most likely reason I guess would that a very large percentage of Thais claim some form of Chinese ancestry.
> * To call a country full of any type of people is the definition of racism*
This is bullshit. This kind of stuff isn’t black and white. Am I racist for calling Monaco a place full of rich people? Of course not, I’m describing the situation people are in, not their characters. Same holds here.
Expanding the area of attack is why 'racist' accusations are hard to take seriously anymore. Painting with broad strokes is different than ethnic prejudice. It's a lazy rebuttal and I implore you to try harder to make your case.
Hacker news comment section is for debate and honest exchange of ideas. Your use of ad hominem to call me “the wrong kind of person to engage with” shows your lack of seriousness and inability to respond with facts, logic and reason. Instead, you use cheap short snarky comments.
I did not call him a racist. I said his statement could be understood as racist.
The astroturfing statement was NOT directed at all Vietnamese people. Was it directed at the parent? Maybe. I don’t know. It was pure stream of thought typing. I was just vibe commenting in that one before I got “engaged.”
> I did not call him a racist. I said his statement could be understood as racist
This postmodern redefinition of racism really needs to be discarded. It’s done so much damage by giving actual racists cover, since if everyone is racist then racism isn’t a problem.
My SO's family is from the portion of Gia Lai neighboring Cambodia. Gia Lai itself is fairly poor, but ime the neighboring half of Cambodia is even poorer and desperate.
It's the same story in the Mekong Delta as well (having had to go to extended family weddings in rural An Giang).
And calling out the relative lawlessness in Cambodia is not racism in any shape or form. Based on your comment history, it seems you are reflexively defensive about Cambodia to a startling degree.
Cambodia was dealt a bad hand, but so was Vietnam and Laos as well, yet neither have the same degree of institutionalized criminality that you see in Cambodia.
The problem at the end of the day lies with the country's leadership, and a quasi-reformed Khmer Rouge member like Hun Sen just isn't the right leader to help Cambodia develop out of the LDC category.
Heck, Bangladesh (historically a peer of Cambodia) was also formed due to a tumultuous history and severe instability in the 1970s-90s, but concentrated on state capacity development - something which Cambodia's leadership thumbed their nose at in the 2010s.
> Gia Lai itself is fairly poor, but ime the neighboring half of Cambodia is even poorer and desperate.
Based on your biased opinion given your relative partiality toward Vietnamese because of your relationships with your Vietnamese family? How do you know they are “desperate”? Did you interview all of them regularly and perform statistical analysis to compare the neighbors’ relative desperation? What is the relative desperation in Vietnam? Is it a low 4? Cambodia? A high 7.57?
> And calling out the relative lawlessness in Cambodia is not racism in any shape or form. Based on your comment history, it seems you are reflexively defensive about Cambodia to a startling degree.
You are so desperate to make the “desperate” label stick that you try to bring in other labels like “lawlessness.” You are the one reflexively defending Vietnam by making the comparison.
> Cambodia was dealt a bad hand, but so was Vietnam and Laos as well, yet neither have the same degree of institutionalized criminality that you see in Cambodia.
I see no such thing. Don’t try to put words in other people’s mouth. Cambodia has cooperated with the foreign government consistently. Most of the names mentioned are foreigners.
> The problem at the end of the day lies with the country's leadership, and a quasi-reformed Khmer Rouge member like Hun Sen just isn't the right leader to help Cambodia develop out of the LDC category.
If you have lived to Cambodia, you would realize how much the average Cambodian love Hun Sen. He has been their beacon of stability and peace. Contrast that to the foreign-sponsored oppositions that are constantly calling for a coup and a revolutionary war. Cambodians are sick of them and they just want peace.
> Heck, Bangladesh (historically a peer of Cambodia) was also formed due to a tumultuous history and severe instability in the 1970s-90s, but concentrated on state capacity development - something which Cambodia's leadership thumbed their nose at in the 2010s.
This statement shows that your are completely out of touch with the geopolitical reality in Asia. Given the recent developments in Bangladesh, Cambodians should be proud to have avoided the path that Bangladesh took.
Based on the fact that Cambodian day laborers come to work as migrant workers in a region that Vietnamese (Kinh or Jarai) try to leave if they can.
HDI metrics themselves also represents that fact. Gia Lai - one of the poorest provinces in VN - has a higher Human Development Index (HDI) than all of Cambodia.
> Given the recent developments in Bangladesh
Yet the average Bangladeshi earns more money, is significantly more educated, and has a longer life expectancy than the average Cambodian.
Cambodia's HDI remains well below it's LDC peers across Asia, and that divergence only really began in the 2010s.
> Based on your biased opinion given your relative partiality toward Vietnamese...
I have been fairly open on HN about my criticisms about Vietnam, such as the authoritarian regression under To Lam along with VN's increased hallmarks of falling into a real estate and export economy induced middle income trap
> Cambodia has cooperated with the foreign government consistently
South Korea has literally banned Korean nationals from travelling to vast portions of Cambodia today and is considering cancelling aid projects because of non-cooperation from the Cambodian government.
> I see no such thing
In English, "you" is often used in the 3rd person as well, especially when communicating on a forum where conversations and readers are not only the OP
-------------
There is no reason why Cambodia can't pull off a similar developmental story like Vietnam or Bangladesh, yet Cambodian leadership in the 2010s and today has dropped the ball because any attempt at making Cambodia a more open economy would undermine rent seeking activities.
Citations needed for almost everything you just wrote.
On the other hand, South Korea has the right to do whatever it wants within its rights. I strongly support South Korea in its geo-strategic calculus to isolate Cambodia government. They must have very good reason to believe this is the right course of actions.
Cambodian government should learn from this experience and improve its law enforcement and its own geo-strategic planning.
> There is no reason why Cambodia can't pull off a similar developmental story like Vietnam or Bangladesh
Again with the Bangladesh comparison. Can you google Bangladesh and read news about it in the last year before commenting?
HDI comparison of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [0]. Notice how Cambodia and Bangladesh used to be developmental peers until 2010.
Life expectancy comparison of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [1].
Mean years of schooling in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [2]
Gross GNI per Capita PPP (log normalized) in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [3] - the only metric Cambodia is roughly comparable to either country.
There is no way around it - the average Bangladeshi let alone the average Vietnamese is healthier, better educated, and richer than the average Cambodian. And this divergence only began in the 2010s when Hun Sen and Cambodia's political leadership began backsliding into kleptocratic authoritarianism.
How and where in the Merriam-Webster are these supposed to be measures of “desperation”? Where is the citation for Cambodians going to work in Vietnam and not the other way around?
Also, cherry picking PPP GDP instead of commonly used nominal GDP to avoid conceding a point is quite desperate. Cambodia has a higher GDP per capita than Bangladesh but you won’t admit that. Can you buy a barrel of crude oil with PPP dollar? Also, you haven’t admitted that you are clueless about the current Bangladesh political and economic mess.
https://thefinancialexpress.com.bd/stock/foreign-investors-f...
If you want to play the comparison game, the average Vietnamese can also be said to be much poorer and much more desperate than the average Malaysian based on your flawed reasoning.
You are arguing with a wumao which many of us have been seeing in threads regarding Cambodia's pig butchering and its close affiliation with CCP insiders.
This bugbuddy user's modus operandi seem highly similar, detracting conversations and trying to downplay the seriousness of the situation.
In Korean language communities online, many Koreans point out similar accounts posting in broken Korean trying to blame the victims and crying racism when people are justified angry at Cambodia.
All in all, the image of Southeast Asians and Chinese in Korea (already bad due to crimes and illegal visa overstays) have hit rock bottom and this incident is likely going to have a long lasting impact on that community.
It took 10 years for Madoff victims to get most of their money back and he was literally just depositing the money into his checking account. He also almost certainly had much fewer victims than this guy did. Based on the complaint I think there may be a large number of international victims as well. This case will really test whatever claims process the DOJ has but hopefully some measure of compensation can be reached quickly. I suspect there are tens of thousands of scam domains and different addresses used so even identifying who to notify will probably be extremely difficult.
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.
Khesrau Behroz did an amazing podcast about those operations (in German though) [0]. Basically when there was a crack down on providers of illegal sports betting in China, they went abroad and diversified. The betting operation is used to launder the money from those scam operations and betting is still immensely popular in China and done via VPN. Those East Asian sport betting providers are sponsors of many Champions League clubs so their (often changing) names get know the gamblers in China watching the games.
So yea, there are massive amounts of money involved.
There's an interesting "Search Engine" podcast (in English)[0]. Apparently a lot of the people doing the actual scamming are human trafficked and being held in compounds against their will.
From what I understand, a number of them are Chinese nationals. I suspect that taking Chinese slaves might not be a great idea. China tends to carry a big stick; especially in that region.
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.
China permitted/sponsored rebels to seize a decent chunk of the Myanmar side of the Chinese/Myanmar border after a number of Chinese citizens (allegedly including some undercover Chinese police) were killed in a scam compound there.
They operate in places like Cambodia but it's the Chinese
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
The facilities aren't even remotely hidden so it's fair to blame Cambodia for allowing it. They have towns built up around them with restaurants and shops and normal economic functions to support the people running these slave towers. A good chunk of the money is flowing back into China, but there's definitely a good bit that seeps out into the Cambodian economy. Hence why Cambodia's government is more than happy to let it operate.
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.
Yes a huge chunk of the blame falls on Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, etc
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
Compared to Cambodia, sure, but it's an international crime gang, with this particular one being just one branch. I wonder if this was their biggest hoard or if they had more?
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.
That doesn't appear to be how they seized the funds though, the criminal hasn't been caught so they must have hacked his devices to gain access to the private keys. No $5 wrench involved.
I assume by wrote down you mean they saved it in a file somewhere. Amusing to think it would have been safe from that kind of hack if they'd written it on a post it node and stuck it on the bottom of their keyboard.
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.
No, some Cambodians are seeing a very sizeable benefit, probably the standard 20% that the leading family cream off of any major investment in 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.
Probably not, but we should probably not compare a total (potentially across years) with something that is measured yearly like GDP, kind of misleading.
I think they mean the bulk of the sum came from the rise of BTC, moreso than the scam. Like a purse snatcher steals a total of $200 and buys lottery tickets making their proceeds worth $40k.
Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia thailand also catched a few. I would not be surprised if they take advantage of westerners as well. 15Billion++ is a big incentive.
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.
> The new promise of crypto is helping organized crime or sanctioned individuals/countries with payments, and it's delivering!
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.
Instead of these two take this simple rule: not your key not your money.
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.
Criminals can’t count on #1 if they hold the keys on them when they get arrested.
>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.
That’s not necessarily true, though may be for Cambodia. GDP can include black market activities but countries differ in whether they include specific ones and how.
Right, it's not black market if you eventually pay some taxes on it somewhere. Dare we call it washed money, and for our American friends in the audience, laundered money.
Does it even count in there though? Fraud isn't a normal transaction. It's the same as theft, which is simply a transfer from one person to another. An act of fraud or theft doesn't represent creation of value the way profit from legitimate transactions do for "black market" goods/services (even if the goods/services are illegal).
That’s a good point, transferring of assets isn’t counted - although if it’s imports perhaps that’s different. The cost of scamming may be counted, paying people to perform scams certainly could be depending on the type of calculation you do.
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.
If we're just talking about the formula of GDP = gov spend + investment + consumption + net exports, then scamming foreigners would be captured under the "net exports" category. Similar to remittances, which are quite significant components of GDP for some countries.
Admittedly it's doubtful whether this kind of activity would be captured by official statistics.
Remittances aren't counted towards GDP either. The funds can contribute indirectly, as consumption or investment, if spent locally. This $15B didn't make it that far, though.
That money would have flowed somewhere, also I'm not sure OP was talking about impacting the GDP just quantizing it. For Cambodia, it's an extraordinary amount of money. Actually for anywhere it's a ridiculous amount of money.
not really? presumably many people transfer via platforms like Coinbase that use a shared wallet system. You can't just "send the money back where it came from" as those wallets might not actually be controlled by the funds owner.
Even if the victims get their money back it would only account for 25% or so because the price of BTC has moved so far since they lost it. (I think many victims will successfully petition for their money back)
Because they bought Bitcoin and gave it to the scammer, and that Bitcoin is even worth more now, so that’s the ‘most fair’ recompense.
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).
Probably what will happen again and again. If they can do this, why stop at Cambodia? Watch as DOJ begins seizing more and more Bitcoin from everywhere.
Long overdue. At some point, these scam operations are so large that they have to be operating with tacit approval of their host countries, who have been given no incentive to stop the virtual cold war against the personal finances of foreign citizenry that is bringing in millions of dollars into their economy.
> The company is linked to Cambodia's ruling Hun family, which includes the current prime minister, Hun Manet.[4] His cousin Hun To is a major shareholder and director of Huione Pay
> Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos
Are you saying that 30-50% of Cambodia's economy can be directly attributed to scamming and casinos? I find that shocking and hard to believe. Do you have a source for that statement?
First off, the amount seized was not necessarily made in a year.
Second, most of the money would not make it to the Cambodian economy. It is likely laundered abroad. The whole operation is likely multinational, with only the workforce located in Cambodia.
Also keep in mind all the bribes, all the money laundering mentioned in the article by the 100s of affiliated subsidiares of the criminal group all in Cambodia
the big casinos which directly and indirectly support additional laundering
My first experience stepping off the plane in Cambodia was being scammed by the official issuing visas. It was $20, I gave him $50, and he didn't want to give any change back. Scams were the defining part of the tourist experience there.
Haha, it reminded me 20+ years back when I was a kid travelling by train in India where the ticket dispenser did not give me 8 Rs back on a 152 Rs ticket when I paid 160, sounds small but is a big deal for poor. Tangential but that is one thing I really thank digital payments and digitization of ticket dispensing for.
The UK may not have been enabling this guy in particular, but he's not exactly the only one who has been stashing ill-gotten gains in London real estate. Apparently crooks still think it's a great deal despite some of them getting it seized once in a while.
Cambodia is a small country with no natural resources of any kind. Even to grow rice you need diesel for tractors and fertilizers that are produced from natural gas using energy (which Cambodia lacks).
There's very few opportunities for a small country without resources.
And to grow rice you need to somehow get rid of US bombs that majority of Cambodia soil is very well fertilized with.
Between 1965 and 1973 US dropped 2,756,941 tones of bombs on 113,717 sites in Cambidia. Thats more bombs than all allies together used in all of World War II.
Tens of people still getting killed by them every year.
This makes me think of the Barbary Wars where piracy out of the Barbary states was a huge issue. There's also the connection with the slave trade then and the human trafficking for the scam centers now.
> the virtual cold war against the personal finances of foreign citizenry
Comparing a scam to war is inaccurate. The Cold War was a war running cold with the potential to go hot. Cambodia and America are not going to war over this.
Interestingly enough, China is thought to have leaned on the scales in Myanmar’s civil conflict due to pig-butchering there. (Not only were they scamming Chinese, they were also human trafficking them to operate the scams.)
China only began executing those pig-butcherers when the EAO that was providing protection to Chinese pig-butchering gangs in that region of Myanmar (Kachin Independence Army) re-flipped towards India recently [0] and had begun to ignore China [1] and rerouting rare earths and other goods to India [2]
Meanwhile, China never cracked down against similar scams in Cambodia. Most notably, Prince Group remains unsanctioned in China and it's leadership are Mainland Chinese in origin.
While pig butchering (along with opium and human trafficking and other organized crime activities) are a major reason behind Chinese involvement in Myanmar, ignoring the very real proxy war going on between Chinese and Indian interests in Myanmar fails to contextualize some of the decisions that both countries make within Myanmar.
This also explains why you don't see a similar crackdown in Cambodia, which is solidly within the Chinese sphere at this point.
> the EAO that was providing protection to Chinese pig-butchering gangs in that region of Myanmar (Kachin Independence Army)
Kachin is not a relevant location of scam centers. You can find articles that claim otherwise, e.g. https://www.ctol.digital/news/inside-worlds-largest-scam-emp... but from the fact that they mention the Thai border and the city of Myawaddy, which is in Kayin/Karen State, it's clear that they're just confusing Kachin and Kayin.
The Kachin Independence Army seems to finance itself through mining instead.
While it's true that some scammers were recently sentenced to death in China https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78nrx309kzo and this only happened after the Kachin Independence Army disrupted the rare-earth trade with China, that's just a temporal coincidence. The scammers were captured in 2023 in Laukkai in northern Shan State near the Chinese border by the MNDAA (an anti-junta armed group dominated by ethnic Chinese) as part of Operation 1027. China is rumored to have assisted the operation in order to crack down on the scam centers in junta-controlled territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_1027#Cyber-scamming_... The Kachin Independence Army also participated in Operation 1027, but in Kachin, not Shan.
The MNDAA is a close ally of the KIA as both are members of the Northern Alliance, and all the Northern Alliance members saw their relations with China tank after Chinese brokered talks with the Tatmadaw failed [0] last December.
As a result of that failure, all the Northern Alliance members began trying to pivot to other states or in the case of the MNDAA faced the brunt of the Chinese crackdown.
All of that postdates the MNDAA crackdown on scam centers, during which relations with China were excellent. It seems like after Operation 1027, the junta got the message and started handing over their own allies in the scam industry https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/myanmar-junta-transfers... at which point China didn't have much reason to continue supporting anti-junta forces in their offensive and preferred freezing the frontline with a ceasefire instead.
Maybe the reduction of Chinese support encouraged the Kachin Independence Army to seek cooperation with India, but you seemed to be claiming that causality was in the opposite direction (while also misidentifying who was running the scam centers), which I think is clearly contradicted by the timeline of events.
That's interesting - I had seen some news articles reporting that some Chinese pig butchering scammers were encouraging others to target foreigners only, and exclude the mainland Chinese. Like this one: https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/chinas-acquiescence-to...
It's reminiscent of stories about Russian malware doing nothing on machines with Cyrillic keyboard layouts.
Yep, but notice how that article is about Kokang in Myanmar as well.
Cambodia continues to have scam centers targeting Putonghua speakers (including PRC nationals), but there hasn't been a similar crackdown on such activities due to Chinese pressure.
The crackdown in Kokang happened after China flipped to supporting the Tatmadaw against the Northern Alliance [0] and India began peeling historically India-aligned members of the alliance like the KIA and the Arakan Army back into Indian orbit [1].
P.S. Circa 2 years ago, a large portion of Chinese in SF Chinatown became Kokang and Cambodian Chinese. Bamar, Kuki-Zo, and Kachin Myanmarese primarily reside in Daly City, Ingleside/Outer Mission, and Oakland/East Bay.
SF has a lot of Asian and Latiné subcultures and communities - it's kind of insane how underdocumented it is under the guise of "Asian" and "Latino"
China does not have a way to deal with crime in Cambodia. It does not have anti-terrorism law to operate in other countries, also it does not want to upset Cambodia or Myanmar government when not necessary. These Chinese operates in Cambodia are mostly on the wanted list anyway, they don't plan to go back to China. In fact, a person leaving China to Cambodia and Myanmar will be checked and make sure their trip is innocent.
Personally I hate these scammers, they have ruined so many people's lives. It seems that it will never go away. Too much money involved. I wish we can launch drone attacks on these places.
> The Cold War was a war running cold with the potential to go hot
I'm not sure I buy that definition. I think most understand a Cold War to be simply a "war" done without weapons but by other means — via economic means, propaganda, etc.
that stretches the definition of war to mean anything that benefits one state over another, though. that might be a valid definition, but if we're gonna have a real discussion we're gonna have to differentiate between that sort of war and the sort of war where people kill one another with weapons and agree from the start which one we're talking about.
> we are at war with many countries all the time, most of it is cold
Like whom? We (and let's be honest, every other great power) are at war with many countries all of the time, and while they may be cold for long stretches, they absolutely (a) go hot from time to time and (b) are constantly threatening to go hot.
To me "war" is a state of "no rules" hurting. IE nuclear, biological, any weapon goes. Anything less is an exercise in restraint - even if still quite terrible in it's own right.
Which means there are lots of "exercises" of varying lethality, risk profiles, spheres of influence, etc. And yes many countries are jockeying against other countries in varying ways.
Large scale scams against other countries could be seen as an unintended (not a planned government action) exercise that is condoned by the government.
It's 127,271 Bitcoins. Interesting choice not to mention the number of Bitcoins but use its current market value in USD. I feel like this says something about Bitcoin but not sure what exactly.
Edit: Wow, people really don't want to know how many Bitcoins were seized :)
What it means, is that the average person doesn't care about Bitcoin, so if you want the article to apply it the average person, you need to denominate the value in something else.
If someone stole 22 WobiBobbyBones I wouldn't care. If a WobiBobbyBone was worth a billion dollars, then I'd think that's news.
So if somebody sized a stock portfolio should they mention the number of shares? The market value is in most cases more interesting than the number of coins.
If it's a single stock portfolio yeah. If it's like 1000 different stocks then stick that information into an appendix and only use the current market value in the write-up.
It's like confiscating a Ferrari and saying you took $5 million of car parts from a drug dealer. Like instead say you confiscate 2 Ferraris with a total market value of $5 Million.
If they mention it by number of BTC then the USD value would be different for every person who read the article, in a few days it might be dramatically different. Who knows?
While the USD value is important, this puts the number in perspective, since only 21M BTC can ever exist (and a good number of them are out of circulation for various reasons).
so many hard drives in so many landfills where we thought "hell, it's only $20 in btc, hardly worth reclaiming"
I'm proud to say that I was able to acquire about $100 worth of product from the dark web using only what would turn out to be several hundred thousand dollars in bitcoin, so at least mine are still in circulation
There's a cool million in some landfill in rural MO, because I did exactly that.
It's funny to imagine how much the one "random act of pizza" I contributed multiple BTC that I mined on my Dell Dimension Pentium machine (worth multiple pennies USD then) is worth now.
I cashed out a significant amount a few years ago to help pay for an IVF attempt (sadly, it didn't work out for us, but no regrets). Obviously that amount would represent a large sum today.
On the flip side, when I was packing up our house, I found some old paper wallets that I assumed were empty (from a time when I was doing some experimentation with various scripts). One of them had about $2k in BTC, that I promptly added to our downpayment on our new house.
This is regular reporting using end-consumer market rates to inflate numbers.
Just as you could not sell 127,271 bitcoins all at once at market value, you could not just sell cocaine worth $1.4 billion but still confiscated drugs, even in large quantities, are reported with end consumer market rates. Nowadays, if a report mentions that is talking about "street value", that is already a big plus in my book.
It could be more or less meaningful depending on how long the operation has been running, I suppose. That would impact on the integral of the value that was expropriated, as of the time of expropriation.
It says Bitcoin is not a standard denomination. Sort of like if you are in France, and Disney bought Discovery, you would want to know the buying price in euros, not US dollars.
It's CNBC. They have to write this for people who know what a bitcoin is worth, people who know a bitcoin is a thing but have no idea what they're worth, and people who've only ever heard the phrase "bitcoin" as a series of noises. But everyone reading cnbc knows what a dollar is.
This is why crypto could never be considered a currency, even the earliest news about BTC (value, theft, pizza purchases, etc) was always reported in USD values.
No such thing as "crypto". You're intermixing form (BTC Jurisdiction state machine) with particular instance (BTC token, USDC token, whatever fungible or not)
Btw this is low-key the reason why Cambodia almost went to war with Thailand recently. In particular what's interesting is that how quickly Cambodia repurposed scam center employees as internet trolls. They're onto a really powerful golden goose here that not only brings in 15B usd but also empowers the current dictatorship. But also it's a pit of doom that is destined to erupt anytime now.
At this point its accurate to say the Cambodian leadership have completely been subjugated through corruption and that they are no longer running the country but Chinese OCGs who are affiliated with CCP and that they are probably influencing it at a state level on all matters.
We are seeing similar attempts in other Southeast Asian countries and even Korea but Cambodia seems like an outlier. It's sad that not enough of these subversive influence campaigns by China is being talked about here.
Once again, it is America leading the way and using its vast intelligence and military power to be a de-facto global police. Obviously DOJ acted because of Americans were victimized but in doing so have done what South Korean government failed to do.
Lot of heat and criticisms against South Korean government now and its embassy in Cambodia that have largely acted in negligence, even telling one of the victims to report it to Cambodian police and don't bother them.
> At this point its accurate to say the Cambodian leadership have completely been subjugated through corruption and that they are no longer running the country but Chinese OCGs who are affiliated with CCP and that they are probably influencing it at a state level on all matters.
I'm curious how the Bitcoin was actually seized, given that the indictment says the perp is still at large and held the Bitcoin in self custodied wallets.
This sounds very much like the operation described in the book Number Go Up, which is ostensibly about FTX, but is really about a number of crypto operations which may or may not be illegal
I don't understand how he was savvy and organized enough to operate such a massive operation and yet didn't manage to secure his $15 billion crypto wallet... Amazing.
The point of bitcoin was that it can't be taken off you by the state. So either this was severe user error, to the tune of why aren't the keys somewhere secure when there's a billion dollars behind them, or the nominal reason for bitcoin existing is nonsense.
We thinking user error or crypto is nonsense? On the forum I expect the former.
Unless you are suggesting that the encryption algorithms underlying Bitcoin have been broken (which would be absolutely huge news with all sorts of far reaching consequences), then it's clearly the former.
you're right but that's not what we're talking about. we're talking about someone among the social engineers that made a mistake which allowed the DoJ to seize the btc.
Crypto is nonsense for a lot of its stated purposes once you strip away the shared delusions that have been propped up by us living in a fairly stable global society that at least goes through the motions of supporting the rule of law (though this is obviously changing quickly in some places recently).
But then again holding some piece of paper (or a database entry) that says you own some gold that you don't actually have in your possession is equally nonsense that also works until it doesn't.
If you don't pay your debts or taxes then even items that you own and which are in your possession can be taken from you, thanks to the rule of law. Conversely, if someone comes along and takes it from you without legal justification, the rule of law allows you to claim it back. That same rule of law ensures that you are entitled to the gold you own that isn't in your possession.
Drawing the line at possession is arbitrary. Either way your ownership is governed by law, and is only as good as the strength of that law.
I'm not sure if one can merely walk away from a criminal enterprise of that size. As soon as you stop paying certain people you end up in a cage, and unless the stream of money is constant there is no reason to just not reneg on all prior agreements and go in a cage for stuff you already paid authorities off for.
So the whole crypto anonymity thing isn’t actually real? As it turns out, tracing people is still easier than tracing money? Decentralized economies are run by criminal enterprises?! We aren’t safe!?!
Wonder how this whole concept overlays onto LLMs, with a lot more money on the line and a lot less regulation.
You're probably joking, but even if crypto was totally anonymous, running a massive criminal human trafficking empire in the real world is very non-anonymous.
Good old police work still works. Because people need to talk to each other to do stuff. The only time anonymity helps is if you can pull it all off solo, and mix the funds enough to not be traced as well as cover tracks well enough.
Crypto anonymity is still possible if you don't plan to spend your ill-gotten millions or billions particularly quickly. But, of course, you don't get to having a massive active criminal empire that way.
These scams have enormous scale. The Economist has a fascinating podcast about it. The full series requires a subscription, but it is worth at least listening to the first 3 free episodes. https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc
Chances are they still have a lot of the money scammed, just not those particular 15B.
In a way it's like with an overfunded startup: when at some point in time the music stops because even the last would-be investor realized that the business will never be profitable, the company collapses. But all those paychecks received for playing with Other People's Money don't magically return.
They have shareholders who bought the shares for more than the company annual revenue and expect infinite potential of profits to justify the price they paid
After having read the thread it's not clear to me where the "3 years" comes from ?
EDIT and were the keys cracked, or were the passphrases obtained ? It's mentioned elsewhere that he had them written down. Which would be a much easier "hack"
I would love to see a new take on "James Bond" (or similar franchise? new franchise?) — one that is realistic and instead sees our spy move through these modern domains of illegal money instead of battling the clichéd Cold War villains with their Persian cats.
Sounds like good news but the press release doesn't detail how the FBI managed to trace, positively identify and then seize such a huge pile of crypto ($15B) from a suspect they say took extensive steps to launder and hide the source and ownership of the crypto. I'm curious because this guy is clearly very experienced, highly sophisticated and located in a country where the government and law enforcement are obviously tacitly protecting him.
So did the U.S. hack this guy? Anyone who manages to build such a massive multi-national corporation with myriad illicit businesses but also dozens of legitimate businesses with thousands of employees - including a large bank with over 100,000 customers - and then operate it all for over a decade, doesn't strike me as someone who's trivially careless. I mean he managed to successfully protect that much money for a long time from his own criminal co-conspirators (who would certainly include hackers with insider knowledge of his operations), criminal competitors and all the people he was bribing like senior Cambodian politicians, law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
This just strikes me as either a very lucky break or a perhaps a sign that the FBI is adopting a new playbook to go after shielded international operations like this. Like maybe involving U.S. and 'Five Eyes' intelligence assets.
"but the press release doesn't detail how the FBI managed to trace, positively identify and then seize such a huge pile of crypto ($15B) from a suspect they say took extensive steps"
Am I slow??? or what under circumstance that you expect FBI to told press how their operate????
I am also curious how the US government obtained possession of the bitcoin if the defendant is still at large. Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of bitcoin?
According to Ars Technica: "Adding further mystery, it’s unknown how federal officials managed to obtain the cryptographic keys required to seize the funds from Zhi."
My assumption is that at this point they just have orders from a judge allowing them to do it and they will find the means later.
Allowing them to do what? The feds are saying they already have the keys, so either they are lying, or they already had the means to get the keys. Which would be the juicy part of the story.
Yes, and the other big questions are how they even know about the existence of the bitcoin and then how they were able to demonstrate sufficient probable cause to a judge that A) the bitcoin belongs to the suspect, and B) this bitcoin is the direct proceeds of the charged crimes. Given the extremely unusual circumstances around this seizure, its unprecedented size and the complete lack of details - I suspect something new and interesting has happened here.
Unfortunately, we may never find out unless they manage to arrest the suspect, which seems unlikely. The more interesting scenario might be if the Prince Group files suit challenging the seizure. In that case, the government would not only have to produce evidence proving A and B above, but also that the evidence wasn't obtained illegally (like from secret NSA wiretaps on domestic Cambodian telecoms or targeted covert hacking). Given the circumstances, it's hard to imagine the FBI being able to offer plausible 'parallel construction' to support the legality of the evidence.
Finding a judge who does not really understand what Bitcoin is won't be too hard. All your "evidence wasn't obtained illegally" and so on are questions impossiblec to ask without a reasonable amount of knowledge. Requirements of a judge order aren't really much of a bar to jump, hardly more than a four eyes formality.
There exist a number of possibilities, all of which are equally likely
1. they are lying. The most obvious one. It's legal and is expected that law enforcement lie in the United States.
2. defendant was so dumb he had the funds in a crypto exchange account
3. Law enforcement has no idea what keys or crypto is. Also likely, law enforcement in the US is not required to be competent.
4. defendant was so dumb he landed on a flight in the US. This would be exceptionally stupid
5. The US military or the intelligence community either coerced the keys out of him or just beat the keys out of him. There are no jurisdictional issues with this approach. From what I understand this guy isn't very popular in any country, so few countries would care. Even fewer would want to publicly discuss how their sovereignty was violated
6. A random member of the criminal organization had access to most but not all of the keys. He showed up at a US embassy and said "well I did lots of bad stuff. I'd like to disappear now & not at a location named Guantanmo! How about we cut a deal"
My personal bet is on #3. It's effectively impossible for anyone to prove they don't have the keys. The only person who could do that would the defendant, who has no interest in doing so.
Good reply. While #2 and #4 are certainly possible, I find it hard to believe this guy gets this far for this long without being sufficiently paranoid and street smart.
I think the most likely is a combo variant of #5 and #6. Maybe the USG (or a cooperating government) got leverage on one of his lieutenants - like lieutenant's adult kid goes to NYC to party for a weekend with friends without telling daddy and despite it being against dad's rules. USG quietly holds the kid under some immigration pretext (much easier these days) and forces the lieutenant to put a USB thumb drive in his boss's 'special' PC.
Alternatively, a probable weak point with most overtly criminal kingpins who accumulate literal billions is they really can't trust anyone around them to not steal it. So the guy probably has to keep the crypto keys to his 'big wad' physically with him on a mobile device or memory stick, maybe protected only by a password short enough he can remember it. In that scenario, the USG just does a 'sneak and peek' and images the device, maybe while the guy is transiting a third country. Then it's just a matter of either using one of the NSA's tier 1 vulns on the mobile device image or deploying the NSA's super-computer farm to crack the 'human-memorable' password. If so, it would have been much smarter for the guy to control access to the 'big wad' with split keys separated on multiple devices - and only keep one required part around his neck. Then neither the 'sneak and peak' nor the 'crowbar to the balls' methods would work.
In any of those scenarios, the very interesting part is it shows the Trump admin and Trump's new FBI head Kash Patel are willing to cross some new lines which haven't been publicly crossed before - like using secret intelligence assets for purely criminal enforcement. Note: I think the USG has done this before but it's been pretty rare and always been in ways that were unseen or otherwise deniable, because the CIA/NSA have been extremely resistant to using their best toys for fear of losing their best toys. I suspect the Trump admin has crushed this resistance. A potentially relevant fact is Kash Patel was previously on the National Security Council during Trump's first term, so he'd be familiar with intel assets. Obviously, in the near-term that's bad news for a handful of major international criminals and in the long-term it may be bad for US intelligence capabilities (as the reasons for CIA/NSA resistance weren't baseless).
Quite possible they hacked the device they were stored on. I can't find confirmation that Chen has actually been arrested, as opposed to being charged in absentia.
> Those funds (the Defendant Cryptocurrency) are presently in the custody of the U.S. government.
> The defendant and his co-conspirators subsequently used some of the criminal proceeds for luxury travel and entertainment and to make extravagant purchases such as watches, yachts, private jets, vacation homes, high-end collectables, and rare artwork, including a Picasso painting purchased through an auction house in New York City.
My guess some of defendants were in New York or around the US. You can be a criminal master mind and also be a complete f*king idiot.
Typically, they need to get a conviction in court to actually do anything with the seized funds. At the moment, they don't even have the guy in custody.
Bitcoin market cap is $2.2T, so $15B of that is 0.7% of all bitcoins. They aren't selling them on open market, but in an auction (or a couple of auctions). It may not have an immediate influence on the bitcoin price, unless the buyer sells them right away. When someone sells an amount that big, it's done over a long period of time, to not crash the market (you'd probably get significantly less money if you sold it fast).
> Once they did, however, the marshals fell back on standard procedure, preparing to handle the Bitcoin the same way they would a coke smuggler’s speedboat: by auctioning it off. That posed challenges because of the sheer size of the seizure—about 175,000 Bitcoins, or 2% of all the Bitcoin in circulation at the time. According to a prosecutor familiar with the case, the marshals opted for a staggered series of auctions to avoid crashing Bitcoin’s price. In four auctions between June 2014 and November 2015, the marshals sold the Silk Road Bitcoins for an average price of $379. (https://fortune.com/crypto/2018/02/21/government-forfeiture-...)
There were also some bitcoins seized from a hacker that stole them from Silk Road in 2013, and when they seized it in 2020 it was worth $1B, now it's worth $6.5B. Nice profit for the government. https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/09/federal-government-all...
The ruling family in Cambodia is a big part of it, via their ownership in HuiOne (now renamed), which is essentially the clearing house for the 'industry'.
In fact the Thai-Cambodia border conflict is due to this industry, and a breakdown in the relationship between Thai and Cambodian leaders over it, with the wiley cambodian leader yet again provoking the sensitive border issue for political gain.
No, it was a "Russia invading Ukraine" sized miscalculation.
The "wily" Cambodian leader's military got their asses handed to them by the Thai army, and Cambodia is suffering a lot more from the still ongoing border closure than Thailand is. Remittances, tourism, trade, you name it, it's all in the doldrums. (Good time to visit Angkor Wat if you can swing it, though.)
I'm living in Thailand and been following scam centers for years now. It's 100% the scam center fallout mixed with regional politics.
Cambodia is fully commited to scam centers and Thailand doesn't like that and even reached out to Xi directly for cooperation here. Not even a year later the conflict broke.
Finally, cambodia is not suffering at all and if anything the current dictator has become significantly stronger and the country has been on a huge nationalist rise as the dictators control the scam centers and easily repurpose them for online propaganda.
Cambodian people are suffering, no doubt about it, but what you say about the surge in nationalism and entrenching his position is certainly true; the 'leadership' has only gotten stronger.
It's surreal how Cambodians are blindly, even passionately, following the government narrative of evil rapacious Thailand invading innocent peace-loving Cambodia, when there is strong evidence showing it was Cambodia provoking the issue to meddle in Thai politics, but there is such deep-seated pride (on both sides I think) that truth is disregarded.
Militarily you are right, but remember war is politics by other means.
Thailand's Thaksin is now in jail and his daughter, basically his avatar, has been removed from government. Mission accomplished.
And to get a sense of how powerful this scam industry is in the country, the latest news is of a young Korean murdered after being kidnapped by a scam gang. Korea has responded forcefully, calling out the danger, yet the Cambodian press is now full of accusations that Korea is defaming Cambodia, that they are just as guilty of human-trafficking Cambodian brides, that some Koreans who were 'rescued' from a scam center don't actually want to go home, that the international press are unfairly treating Cambodia ... you know the story by now.
> The practice is called “pig butchering” because scammers deliberately build up trust and emotionally manipulate victims over an extended period—much like fattening up a pig—before ultimately stealing as much money as possible in a final act of financial “slaughter”
And it's a bad expression, because it's the scammers own smug term of contempt, and makes victims less likely to come forward/warn each other thanks to the shame.
In my experience, folks who dabble in crypto and even seasoned users always underestimate how hard and tricky of a problem proper self-custody actually is.
And when they do think about it, it's always too late.
And by the way, multi-sig is not the only thing you want to be thinking about.
Cold walletting is another that most people miss.
Also, avoiding concentrating a large number of coins on a small number of addresses (not that I know this was done in the cast of this scam) is another thing most people miss when in fact this was from day one listed as bad practice by IIRC Satoshi himself.
And finally, to mention the standard counter-argument to self-custody: the $5 pipe wrench attack only works if the attackers know the coins exist.
For those interested in plumbing the depth of the problem, the glacier protocol is a good place to start:
Since in pig butchering scams the victims often do not go to the police or tell anyone due to feelings of shame, we can assume quite a big pot of that money will go into the US federal crypto reserve.
So in these cases of government seizing bitcoin, the people they seize from have unencrypted private keys?
The article just says "private keys the defendant had in his possession" does this mean he was holding onto private keys that had no passwords / encryption at all that unlocked $15B?
Or does the government have an alternative way of "seizing" bitcoin? I remember years ago people throwing around conspiracy theories that bitcoin was invented by the NSA / other 3 letter agencies with a backdoor to basically allow easy tracking / seizure of criminal assets.
Im not a conspiracy theorist, but stories like these were the government seems so easy to seize such incredibly large amounts of money so easily seems to suggest some other mechanisms that aren't public.
> Zhi and a network of top executives in the Prince Group are accused of using political influence in multiple countries to protect their criminal enterprise and paid bribes to public officials to avoid actions by law enforcement authorities targeting the scheme, according to prosecutors.
Gentle reminder that the presence of a strong democratic regime with law and no bribes keeps the world a better place.
Once the US becomes corrupted at this scale we are doomed to this bullshit.
Already past that, I'm afraid. With the Presidential cryptocurrency and the lack of investigation into Supreme Court finances, it's going to be grift all the way down.
I'm not sure how you can pull out of it without jailing a significant fraction of the Republican party (and quite a few elderly Democrats). Plenty of people around Trump got jailed and that didn't make a difference.
We basically have that in the US except the government has a monopoly on the police force. The libertarian police corp would be infinitely better as at least there would be competition for police services.
It’s only technically incorrect to suggest that Musk should protest over the recent $15B scam profit seizure—it was from Cambodian scams, whereas the compounds that reportedly had to switch to Starlink due to being disconnected from the Internet are in Myanmar[0]—but yes, it’s still unclear why would Musk not shut any of it down if they have the capability (and if they don’t, then it’s another interesting controversy).
Who they were scamming, Americans? How they managed to gain trust, even considering strong accent or grammatical mistakes. How do they identify and trace these Chinese fraudsters? They all look the same and have a name like Hi Lo. Where the money go... of course real estate.
With the recent insane moves in quantum stocks almost makes me wonder if there’s a possibility the NSA or other USG agency is far enough ahead of publicly known capabilities in quantum computing to brute force private keys/break encryption and this info is leaking into markets.
Of course the more likely explanation is that this was a sophisticated albeit classical hack (infrastructure, social engineering, surveillance, whatever) and the quantum run-up is unrelated retail investor hysteria, but have to consider the possibility the market knows something I don’t. If the government stays far ahead enough of private industry at some point in the coming years (or decades) the USG will break encryption without public disclosure unless quantum resistant algs are put in place before that capability is achieved. Hopefully this more exotic implausibility isn’t the explanation, but entertaining to consider, and history is bizarre enough for it to be true.
I certainly do. If I really thought such a fringe explanation was anything more than highly improbable I don’t think I would feel comfortable even mentioning it at all. Still I find it a worthwhile exercise to consider outlier scenarios. The real story of course is probably even more bizarre and fascinating but I’m not sure we’ll get the declassified details this century of how the USG pulled off the biggest heist from heisters ever.
Seems organised crime is taking advantage of less-policed (or lawless) regions in Cambodia and Burma.
The spectre of a similar scam has resulted in lower Chinese tourism to Thailand. Basically Chinese (among other nationalities) tourists were led from the airport by fake immigration staff, put into cars and driven to Burma and forced to work 18 hour days in scam call centers.
A chilling but extremely worthwhile read.
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/SOUTHEASTASIA-SCAMS/mypmxwd...
I got a lot less snarky in my responses to scam text messages when I learned about the forced labor aspect. I just block the sender and go on, versus trying to bait them and waste their time.
I don't understand this logic. If someone is robbing you because they are being forced to do it they are still committing a crime and are worthy of the full force of the law, and the ire of the public.
You bait and waste time to save less aware people from being scammed. This is a multi-billion dollar industry that prays of the most vulnerable in our society. In America, we are the number one target of scammers of all kinds. These scammers are sick people. Full stop. To allow your morals to be compromised to the point you would scam a pensioner out of probably the only money they have to live is disgusting. I can't even in the deepest parts of my heart find a single nanogram of sympathy. 30 years in prison wouldn't be enough for these types of people.
I personally have no sympathy for these people whether or not they're victims. You get a choice in life to stand on your morals or allow them to be eroded. If you choose to do something you know is wrong then you are no better than any other person who knowingly commits such acts. Therefore, these scammers deserve severe prison sentences no different than any other. "Just doing my job" hasn't worked since Nuremberg and it shouldn't work now.
To what extreme do you take this? Would you rather be killed than scam someone? That’s a principled stance if so, but I’d personally rather you try to scam me if the alternative is you being beaten up, or worse
> I personally have no sympathy for these people whether or not they're victims
That’s an interesting moral philosophy. Do you think that no one ever deserves sympathy for something they were forced to do? If a Mexican drug cartel threatens to kill someone’s entire family if they don’t perform a reprehensible act, no one should feel the tiniest bit bad for them if they don’t stand on principle?
I assume you don’t actually think that, but when you hear that people are being kidnapped, trafficked abroad, and forced to work in clandestine Burmese call centers, what do you think their options are?
The 24 Nuremburg defendents all held high level leadership positions and were hardly representative of the rank and file "just doing their jobs".
The freer you are, the easier it is to stand on principle. When your life or your freedom is at stake, you will do things that you never thought possible. We are genetically programmed to preserve our own lives, as well as those of our loved ones, at just about any cost.
I don't want somebody being held against their will and forced to do a "job" to be beaten because I wanted to fuck with a scammer.
>I personally have no sympathy for these people whether or not they're victims. You get a choice in life to stand on your morals or allow them to be eroded. If you choose to do something you know is wrong then you are no better than any other person who knowingly commits such acts.
That's nice, but if someone points a weapon at me and tells me to rob people over the phone i'll probably do it.
Were? they still are. It's not even a small amount there are thousands of people at these centers.
also this isn't a "lawless" region that OP is talking about they are in city centers in Cambodia and the Cambodian police and government officials are all getting paid off to let them operate freely.
it really is disgusting to see this level of corruption and that its going to have long term economic impact on Cambodia and Cambodians abroad.
Spent significant time in Vietnam & Cambodia & Thailand. Cambodia is a sad country full of desperate people. "less-policed" is the entire country. ~50 years since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide.
Vietnam was by far my favorite of the three and the contrast between the three countries is stark.
> Spent significant time in Vietnam & Cambodia & Thailand. Cambodia is a sad country full of desperate people.
Probably should also include which country is responsible for the current condition of the country.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1175241-once-you-ve-been-to...
Content: "Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević."
I had to read up, and...my goodness.
Apparently the US bombed a neutral Cambodia secretly to incite Vietnam's neighboring countries and put pressure on them, killing 30k to 150k civilians. This caused unrest, and gave way to Khmer Rouge to sieze power, using "defense against the US" as propoganda.
And we dropped more bombs on poor Laos (mostly because pilots weren't supposed to land back at base with bombs still on board) than on Japan and Germany combined... they estimate it will take about 600 years to removed all the unexploded cluster bombs and children regurly get maimed and killed by them (they look like tennis balls).
The Chin, Hmong, and Lao are some of the nicest people you will ever meet, too.
Pol Pot probably was more proximally at fault.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
It's a giant mess. I don't think Pot would have gained the support/power that he did without the US indiscriminate bombing. Much like the creation of ISIS and the strengthening of the Taliban in Afghanistan, it turns out people don't like the people dropping bombs on them. They'll turn to whoever is fighting the bombers.
The US involvement in Vietnam would have already been over before the uprising of Pot had Nixon and Kissinger not skuttled peace talks to help Nixon get elected.
Iraq, for example, didn’t turn into Cambodia and conditions pre-ISIS in Syria more directly fostered its creation.
See a discussion of “proximate cause.”[1]
[1] https://legalclarity.org/what-is-the-difference-between-dire...
Wait until you learn about East Timor. “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” by Christopher Hitchens is a short, devastating read on the man, the monster.
I know I'm wonderful at parties but I catch so much shit, here but not especially, when I point out the incredible wrongs and the sheer body count of America's colonialist projects here into the modern day.
It really cannot be overstated. The developing world is still developing thanks to it's own institutional issues, to be sure, as everywhere else on the globe struggles with, but America has never had a larger, stronger America come in and just fuck it right up for literally no reason apart from larger geopolitical games.
I think PolPot has more responsibility for this.
He's responsible, but the question is if he'd have gained the power and support without the US's meddling.
How does Laos compare?
Sorry, I can't say. I always stayed near the water for work as a dive master or ESL teacher, so I never made it to Laos.
The Cambodian civil war only ended in 1991. To call a country full of any type of people is the definition of racism. YC news moderation standards is quite something these days. For actual foreigners’ opinions of Cambodia after having lived there long term, watch this YouTuber’s videos: Austin Tukwa @austintukwa https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhN9L6mXjPI
Vietnam’s repeat-visitor share is around 5%. The desperation I see is the large amount Vietnam tourism astroturfing. https://www.duongbusinessconsulting.com/international-busine...
> To call a country full of any type of people is the definition of racism.
"The USA is full of people who believe in freedom of speech". Racist?
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How does calling a country full of people who are sad and desperate for a better life discriminate against them? This is the same kind of rhetoric I would hear someone use as an appeal to helping them. Hearing about these things makes me more kind and empathetic to the people involved - not less. It feels like you are trying to do a good intentioned thing here but maybe it’s misaligned to more malicious folks compare with how most people read these comments
Negative stereotyping of a whole group is racism because it promotes discrimination or hatred toward that group. Positive stereotypes are not racism under this definition because they do not promote discrimination or hatred.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/racism
On "poor" vs. "desperate": these are different negative stereotypes that get mixed up.
"Poor" is a financial state (a lack of money). The most common negative stereotype is that people in poverty are unmotivated or lazy, which wrongly attaches character flaws to an economic condition. A person can be poor and still have dignity, hope, and resourcefulness.
"Desperate" is an emotional state of hopelessness that can lead to reckless action. The stereotype suggests weakness or manipulativeness. A person can be financially well-off but feel desperate due to a health crisis, relationship failure, etc.
Conflating them is wrong because one can be poor but not desperate, and one can be desperate but not poor.
> Negative stereotyping of a whole group is racism
I’m not in Cambodia. The only way I can relate to its people is by stereotyping.
Saying we can’t negatively stereotype basically says you can only have positive opinions about this country or you’re a racist, which is absurd.
> Saying we can’t negatively stereotype basically says you can only have positive opinions about this country
This logical fallacy is a False Dichotomy (also known as a False Dilemma or Black-and-White Fallacy).
This fallacy occurs when an argument incorrectly presents two opposing options as the only possibilities, when in fact a wide range of other options exist.
How it applies to the statement: The statement "Saying we can’t negatively stereotype basically says you can only have positive opinions about this country" creates a false choice between:
Option A: Engaging in negative stereotypes. Option B: Only having positive opinions. This completely ignores the vast and reasonable middle ground, which is legitimate, specific criticism.
Different cultures are ... wait for it ... different. There are cultures I would not want to live in.
There's a reason why so many people are desperate to get into the US.
Yes, I agree the US is an a great country. The US culture is still the most influential in the world. Everyone loves American foods, movies, and consumer products.
Cambodians love American culture. Young Cambodians are desperate to see new American movies, try American foods, and get their hands on new Apple products. They love Facebook. The majority of Cambodians favor the US over China: https://www.statista.com/chart/32058/preference-for-us-china...
Interestingly, the majority of Thais favor China over the US. The most likely reason I guess would that a very large percentage of Thais claim some form of Chinese ancestry.
> * To call a country full of any type of people is the definition of racism*
This is bullshit. This kind of stuff isn’t black and white. Am I racist for calling Monaco a place full of rich people? Of course not, I’m describing the situation people are in, not their characters. Same holds here.
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Expanding the area of attack is why 'racist' accusations are hard to take seriously anymore. Painting with broad strokes is different than ethnic prejudice. It's a lazy rebuttal and I implore you to try harder to make your case.
And I implore you to try harder to make your own counter argument comprehensible.
Oh boy I regret replying to this person in a higher up thread.
Really the wrong kind of person to engage with
Hacker news comment section is for debate and honest exchange of ideas. Your use of ad hominem to call me “the wrong kind of person to engage with” shows your lack of seriousness and inability to respond with facts, logic and reason. Instead, you use cheap short snarky comments.
> debate and honest exchange of ideas
Yet in your first post in this thread, you accuse your parent of racism and astroturfing. Real honest debate you got there.
I did not call him a racist. I said his statement could be understood as racist.
The astroturfing statement was NOT directed at all Vietnamese people. Was it directed at the parent? Maybe. I don’t know. It was pure stream of thought typing. I was just vibe commenting in that one before I got “engaged.”
> I did not call him a racist. I said his statement could be understood as racist
This postmodern redefinition of racism really needs to be discarded. It’s done so much damage by giving actual racists cover, since if everyone is racist then racism isn’t a problem.
Negative racial stereotype as a definition of racism is the classical definition of racism. There is nothing postmodern about it.
> Negative racial stereotype as a definition of racism is the classical definition of racism
It wasn’t racial stereotyping. It was stereotyping a country’s population as sad and desperate. Saying X country’s quality of life sucks isn’t racist.
If they’d said or implied Cambodian Americans are also sad and desperate, sure. But they didn’t.
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My SO's family is from the portion of Gia Lai neighboring Cambodia. Gia Lai itself is fairly poor, but ime the neighboring half of Cambodia is even poorer and desperate.
It's the same story in the Mekong Delta as well (having had to go to extended family weddings in rural An Giang).
And calling out the relative lawlessness in Cambodia is not racism in any shape or form. Based on your comment history, it seems you are reflexively defensive about Cambodia to a startling degree.
Cambodia was dealt a bad hand, but so was Vietnam and Laos as well, yet neither have the same degree of institutionalized criminality that you see in Cambodia.
The problem at the end of the day lies with the country's leadership, and a quasi-reformed Khmer Rouge member like Hun Sen just isn't the right leader to help Cambodia develop out of the LDC category.
Heck, Bangladesh (historically a peer of Cambodia) was also formed due to a tumultuous history and severe instability in the 1970s-90s, but concentrated on state capacity development - something which Cambodia's leadership thumbed their nose at in the 2010s.
> Gia Lai itself is fairly poor, but ime the neighboring half of Cambodia is even poorer and desperate.
Based on your biased opinion given your relative partiality toward Vietnamese because of your relationships with your Vietnamese family? How do you know they are “desperate”? Did you interview all of them regularly and perform statistical analysis to compare the neighbors’ relative desperation? What is the relative desperation in Vietnam? Is it a low 4? Cambodia? A high 7.57?
> And calling out the relative lawlessness in Cambodia is not racism in any shape or form. Based on your comment history, it seems you are reflexively defensive about Cambodia to a startling degree.
You are so desperate to make the “desperate” label stick that you try to bring in other labels like “lawlessness.” You are the one reflexively defending Vietnam by making the comparison.
> Cambodia was dealt a bad hand, but so was Vietnam and Laos as well, yet neither have the same degree of institutionalized criminality that you see in Cambodia.
I see no such thing. Don’t try to put words in other people’s mouth. Cambodia has cooperated with the foreign government consistently. Most of the names mentioned are foreigners.
> The problem at the end of the day lies with the country's leadership, and a quasi-reformed Khmer Rouge member like Hun Sen just isn't the right leader to help Cambodia develop out of the LDC category.
If you have lived to Cambodia, you would realize how much the average Cambodian love Hun Sen. He has been their beacon of stability and peace. Contrast that to the foreign-sponsored oppositions that are constantly calling for a coup and a revolutionary war. Cambodians are sick of them and they just want peace.
> Heck, Bangladesh (historically a peer of Cambodia) was also formed due to a tumultuous history and severe instability in the 1970s-90s, but concentrated on state capacity development - something which Cambodia's leadership thumbed their nose at in the 2010s.
This statement shows that your are completely out of touch with the geopolitical reality in Asia. Given the recent developments in Bangladesh, Cambodians should be proud to have avoided the path that Bangladesh took.
> How do you know they are “desperate”
Based on the fact that Cambodian day laborers come to work as migrant workers in a region that Vietnamese (Kinh or Jarai) try to leave if they can.
HDI metrics themselves also represents that fact. Gia Lai - one of the poorest provinces in VN - has a higher Human Development Index (HDI) than all of Cambodia.
> Given the recent developments in Bangladesh
Yet the average Bangladeshi earns more money, is significantly more educated, and has a longer life expectancy than the average Cambodian.
Cambodia's HDI remains well below it's LDC peers across Asia, and that divergence only really began in the 2010s.
> Based on your biased opinion given your relative partiality toward Vietnamese...
I have been fairly open on HN about my criticisms about Vietnam, such as the authoritarian regression under To Lam along with VN's increased hallmarks of falling into a real estate and export economy induced middle income trap
> Cambodia has cooperated with the foreign government consistently
South Korea has literally banned Korean nationals from travelling to vast portions of Cambodia today and is considering cancelling aid projects because of non-cooperation from the Cambodian government.
> I see no such thing
In English, "you" is often used in the 3rd person as well, especially when communicating on a forum where conversations and readers are not only the OP
-------------
There is no reason why Cambodia can't pull off a similar developmental story like Vietnam or Bangladesh, yet Cambodian leadership in the 2010s and today has dropped the ball because any attempt at making Cambodia a more open economy would undermine rent seeking activities.
Citations needed for almost everything you just wrote.
On the other hand, South Korea has the right to do whatever it wants within its rights. I strongly support South Korea in its geo-strategic calculus to isolate Cambodia government. They must have very good reason to believe this is the right course of actions.
Cambodian government should learn from this experience and improve its law enforcement and its own geo-strategic planning.
> There is no reason why Cambodia can't pull off a similar developmental story like Vietnam or Bangladesh
Again with the Bangladesh comparison. Can you google Bangladesh and read news about it in the last year before commenting?
> Citations needed
HDI comparison of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [0]. Notice how Cambodia and Bangladesh used to be developmental peers until 2010.
Life expectancy comparison of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [1].
Mean years of schooling in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [2]
Gross GNI per Capita PPP (log normalized) in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh [3] - the only metric Cambodia is roughly comparable to either country.
There is no way around it - the average Bangladeshi let alone the average Vietnamese is healthier, better educated, and richer than the average Cambodian. And this divergence only began in the 2010s when Hun Sen and Cambodia's political leadership began backsliding into kleptocratic authoritarianism.
[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/BGD+KHM+VNM/?level...
[1] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/lifexp/BGD+KHM+VNM/?lev...
[2] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/msch/BGD+KHM+VNM/?level...
[3] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/lgnic/BGD+KHM+VNM/?leve...
How and where in the Merriam-Webster are these supposed to be measures of “desperation”? Where is the citation for Cambodians going to work in Vietnam and not the other way around?
Also, cherry picking PPP GDP instead of commonly used nominal GDP to avoid conceding a point is quite desperate. Cambodia has a higher GDP per capita than Bangladesh but you won’t admit that. Can you buy a barrel of crude oil with PPP dollar? Also, you haven’t admitted that you are clueless about the current Bangladesh political and economic mess. https://thefinancialexpress.com.bd/stock/foreign-investors-f...
If you want to play the comparison game, the average Vietnamese can also be said to be much poorer and much more desperate than the average Malaysian based on your flawed reasoning.
Here are some really desperate Vietnamese trying to run away from Vietnam into the UK: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8y3l7e2vjo.amp
You are arguing with a wumao which many of us have been seeing in threads regarding Cambodia's pig butchering and its close affiliation with CCP insiders.
This bugbuddy user's modus operandi seem highly similar, detracting conversations and trying to downplay the seriousness of the situation.
In Korean language communities online, many Koreans point out similar accounts posting in broken Korean trying to blame the victims and crying racism when people are justified angry at Cambodia.
All in all, the image of Southeast Asians and Chinese in Korea (already bad due to crimes and illegal visa overstays) have hit rock bottom and this incident is likely going to have a long lasting impact on that community.
Wouldn’t real life be so much easier if you could just call someone a wumao/troll and immediately call a debate win? Ah the magic of the internet.
I may not agree with all your comments here but I do agree that name-calling/pigeonholing of this fashion is simply unproductive
It took 10 years for Madoff victims to get most of their money back and he was literally just depositing the money into his checking account. He also almost certainly had much fewer victims than this guy did. Based on the complaint I think there may be a large number of international victims as well. This case will really test whatever claims process the DOJ has but hopefully some measure of compensation can be reached quickly. I suspect there are tens of thousands of scam domains and different addresses used so even identifying who to notify will probably be extremely difficult.
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.
Khesrau Behroz did an amazing podcast about those operations (in German though) [0]. Basically when there was a crack down on providers of illegal sports betting in China, they went abroad and diversified. The betting operation is used to launder the money from those scam operations and betting is still immensely popular in China and done via VPN. Those East Asian sport betting providers are sponsors of many Champions League clubs so their (often changing) names get know the gamblers in China watching the games.
So yea, there are massive amounts of money involved.
[0] https://www.rbb-online.de/legion/
There's an interesting "Search Engine" podcast (in English)[0]. Apparently a lot of the people doing the actual scamming are human trafficked and being held in compounds against their will.
[0]https://www.searchengine.show/whos-behind-these-scammy-text-...
From what I understand, a number of them are Chinese nationals. I suspect that taking Chinese slaves might not be a great idea. China tends to carry a big stick; especially in that region.
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
China permitted/sponsored rebels to seize a decent chunk of the Myanmar side of the Chinese/Myanmar border after a number of Chinese citizens (allegedly including some undercover Chinese police) were killed in a scam compound there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_1027
They operate in places like Cambodia but it's the Chinese
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
The facilities aren't even remotely hidden so it's fair to blame Cambodia for allowing it. They have towns built up around them with restaurants and shops and normal economic functions to support the people running these slave towers. A good chunk of the money is flowing back into China, but there's definitely a good bit that seeps out into the Cambodian economy. Hence why Cambodia's government is more than happy to let it operate.
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.
Yes a huge chunk of the blame falls on Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, etc
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
Compared to Cambodia, sure, but it's an international crime gang, with this particular one being just one branch. I wonder if this was their biggest hoard or if they had more?
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.
The difference between 15 billion and 2.24 trillion is pretty much 2.24 trillion. I'm not sure there is a definition of the word where this is true .
In $5 wrench we trust. - Bitcoin
That doesn't appear to be how they seized the funds though, the criminal hasn't been caught so they must have hacked his devices to gain access to the private keys. No $5 wrench involved.
It’s probably a computer hack of some sort that led to accessing the wallet password etc.
I bet somebody wrote down their password, too scared of what would happen to them if they were to forget it.
I assume by wrote down you mean they saved it in a file somewhere. Amusing to think it would have been safe from that kind of hack if they'd written it on a post it node and stuck it on the bottom of their keyboard.
Nah, you know he had his wallet backed up to his My Documents folder as json…
not a sticky note on the desktop?
Which just goes to show that custody is a hard and almost always under-estimated problem.
It is, but it's not so hard that you can't figure it out to keep your 15 billion safe.
It's much harder to keep things safe under rule of villains than rule of law.
Well these guys apparently didn't manage that.
There is no honor among pig butchers.
> although Bitcoin's market cap is $2.24 trillion at the moment, $15 billion is a significant chunk of that.
Literally about 0.67%.
I wouldn't call that significant.
Does not apply.
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.
No, some Cambodians are seeing a very sizeable benefit, probably the standard 20% that the leading family cream off of any major investment in 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.
> 1/3 of the country's entire GDP
$15 billion is a huge number to be sure, but it's unclear from the article how many years it took to acquire.
So should we praise the gang's money saving habits?
Probably not, but we should probably not compare a total (potentially across years) with something that is measured yearly like GDP, kind of misleading.
No. Just point out as others have that $15 billion vs GDP isn't a likes comparison.
No, isn't it more likely about them earning money quicker than they are able to launder it?
I think they mean the bulk of the sum came from the rise of BTC, moreso than the scam. Like a purse snatcher steals a total of $200 and buys lottery tickets making their proceeds worth $40k.
Pitfalls of comparing flows with stocks.
Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia thailand also catched a few. I would not be surprised if they take advantage of westerners as well. 15Billion++ is a big incentive.
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.
I'm very curious what happens to that money. I very much doubt any of the actual victims will see it.
To the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve it goes!
Wait, hold on, I thought the promise of crypto was that:
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?
The new promise of crypto is helping organized crime or sanctioned individuals/countries with payments, and it's delivering!
> The new promise of crypto is helping organized crime or sanctioned individuals/countries with payments, and it's delivering!
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.
Instead of these two take this simple rule: not your key not your money.
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.
Criminals can’t count on #1 if they hold the keys on them when they get arrested.
>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.
They used the forbidden technique of 5€ wrench.
It's not even forbidden, anyone can use it.
Beating someone with a wrench feels unlawful/forbidden pretty much everywhere.
Unless you are FBI of course
I mean, I don't disagree, but there are far more government agencies around the world that will beat you with a wrench first.
their business is scam center that by definition is not counted by GDP anyway
That’s not necessarily true, though may be for Cambodia. GDP can include black market activities but countries differ in whether they include specific ones and how.
Right, it's not black market if you eventually pay some taxes on it somewhere. Dare we call it washed money, and for our American friends in the audience, laundered money.
as a pedantic aside Americans use the term washed or washing money interchangeably with laundering or laundered money
Laundering the proceeds from a black market transaction doesn't make the black market transaction not a black market transaction.
Does it even count in there though? Fraud isn't a normal transaction. It's the same as theft, which is simply a transfer from one person to another. An act of fraud or theft doesn't represent creation of value the way profit from legitimate transactions do for "black market" goods/services (even if the goods/services are illegal).
That’s a good point, transferring of assets isn’t counted - although if it’s imports perhaps that’s different. The cost of scamming may be counted, paying people to perform scams certainly could be depending on the type of calculation you do.
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.
If we're just talking about the formula of GDP = gov spend + investment + consumption + net exports, then scamming foreigners would be captured under the "net exports" category. Similar to remittances, which are quite significant components of GDP for some countries.
Admittedly it's doubtful whether this kind of activity would be captured by official statistics.
Remittances aren't counted towards GDP either. The funds can contribute indirectly, as consumption or investment, if spent locally. This $15B didn't make it that far, though.
There are countries that count illegal activities in their GDP estimates.
And should their state sponsored criminal activities count for North Korean GDP for example?
That money would have flowed somewhere, also I'm not sure OP was talking about impacting the GDP just quantizing it. For Cambodia, it's an extraordinary amount of money. Actually for anywhere it's a ridiculous amount of money.
Which makes it worse. A scamming operation that is 1/3 of the GDP is huuuuuuge.
It’s apples to oranges really. You confuse turnover with capital here.
The victims getting their money back would defeat the whole purpose of Bitcoin. No one knows who originally owned it.
How about cash it out and trickle it down to us... or is all that just gonna magically disappear?
Surely it would be possible for victims to come forward and provide a paper trail of WhatsApp transcripts and blockchain transactions.
That's the thing with Bitcoin, all transactions are permanently stored in a public ledger.
Unless the criminals used the Lightning Network of course, not likely though since the amount is so large.
Well you could just reverse all the transactions. But they probably won't do that.
not really? presumably many people transfer via platforms like Coinbase that use a shared wallet system. You can't just "send the money back where it came from" as those wallets might not actually be controlled by the funds owner.
Coin base keeps transaction logs.
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.
Two things are true:
* 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.
Even if the victims get their money back it would only account for 25% or so because the price of BTC has moved so far since they lost it. (I think many victims will successfully petition for their money back)
In theory the court should give them back the actual bitcoin, not the monetary equivalent at the time. In a just world, anyway.
Based on current judicial trends, they’ll probably get Coinbase coupons worth 50% of a different coin or something.
> In theory the court should give them back the actual bitcoin, not the monetary equivalent at the time.
Why? Most of them didn't care about bitcoin, they bought it solely to give to the scammer.
Because they bought Bitcoin and gave it to the scammer, and that Bitcoin is even worth more now, so that’s the ‘most fair’ recompense.
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).
Probably what will happen again and again. If they can do this, why stop at Cambodia? Watch as DOJ begins seizing more and more Bitcoin from everywhere.
It's part of America's new Strategic Crypto Reserve where Uncle Sam holds bags for crypto bros.
It is definitely going to magically disappear, as in used as funding for ICE.
Long overdue. At some point, these scam operations are so large that they have to be operating with tacit approval of their host countries, who have been given no incentive to stop the virtual cold war against the personal finances of foreign citizenry that is bringing in millions of dollars into their economy.
Direct link to the indictment https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/chairman-prince-group-i...
Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos
This one of the other organizations / major bank used for money laundering directly linked to Hun Sen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huione_Group
> The company is linked to Cambodia's ruling Hun family, which includes the current prime minister, Hun Manet.[4] His cousin Hun To is a major shareholder and director of Huione Pay
> Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos
Are you saying that 30-50% of Cambodia's economy can be directly attributed to scamming and casinos? I find that shocking and hard to believe. Do you have a source for that statement?
It's a small / under developed country
the economy is not that big to start with :)
GDP $49.8 Billion (nominal; 2025)
Some examples
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/cambodia...
Formal estimates range from $12.5 to $19 billion dollars per year, equivalent to as much as 60% of the country’s formal GDP
Formal estimates by who? Given that the GDP is around $50B, these (unsourced) numbers don't even make sense.
First off, the amount seized was not necessarily made in a year.
Second, most of the money would not make it to the Cambodian economy. It is likely laundered abroad. The whole operation is likely multinational, with only the workforce located in Cambodia.
Cambodia is also big player in money laundering
(not only for these cambodia originated crimes)
Also keep in mind all the bribes, all the money laundering mentioned in the article by the 100s of affiliated subsidiares of the criminal group all in Cambodia
the big casinos which directly and indirectly support additional laundering
https://www.fincen.gov/system/files/2025-10/Huione-Group-Fin...
https://www.kharon.com/brief/huione-group-cambodia-treasury-...
Every business has revenue / costs
The indictment mentions they were doing 30M/day ~ 10B / year, could be an old message when they were smaller
Guessing that's revenue
They're just one of many organizations in the "industry"
You don't have to launder money when the leader of the country is involved.
My first experience stepping off the plane in Cambodia was being scammed by the official issuing visas. It was $20, I gave him $50, and he didn't want to give any change back. Scams were the defining part of the tourist experience there.
Haha, it reminded me 20+ years back when I was a kid travelling by train in India where the ticket dispenser did not give me 8 Rs back on a 152 Rs ticket when I paid 160, sounds small but is a big deal for poor. Tangential but that is one thing I really thank digital payments and digitization of ticket dispensing for.
It's not hard to believe that a small country can have a vastly oversized economy due to finance - legal or illegal.
This thread is making Cambodia sound like an oversized Cayman Islands.
An example of a legal one is the UK
Or Ireland with the nominally headquartered multinationals there.
Unsurprisingly the UK was enabling this guy before he got too much heat. From a BBC article:
"The UK government says it has frozen assets owned by his network, including 19 properties in London - one of which is worth nearly £100m ($133m)."
> the UK was enabling this guy before he got too much heat.
How does this quote indicate that the UK was enabling Zhi?
Presumably GP means enabling by not seizing him or his assets earlier? Which I find to be a bit of a stretch.
The UK may not have been enabling this guy in particular, but he's not exactly the only one who has been stashing ill-gotten gains in London real estate. Apparently crooks still think it's a great deal despite some of them getting it seized once in a while.
It's true. They have daily flights to Cambodia. Go there and look at it. It's all casinos and scams and dust.
Cambodia is a small country with no natural resources of any kind. Even to grow rice you need diesel for tractors and fertilizers that are produced from natural gas using energy (which Cambodia lacks).
There's very few opportunities for a small country without resources.
And to grow rice you need to somehow get rid of US bombs that majority of Cambodia soil is very well fertilized with.
Between 1965 and 1973 US dropped 2,756,941 tones of bombs on 113,717 sites in Cambidia. Thats more bombs than all allies together used in all of World War II.
Tens of people still getting killed by them every year.
https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabomb...
The amount of bitcoin siezed here is about 30% of the Cambodia GDP...
Presumably they didn’t accumulate it all in one year?
Still, if it was accumulated over three years it seems significant.
They don't have a source because it's total bullshit.
Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos
This is ridiculously false.
This makes me think of the Barbary Wars where piracy out of the Barbary states was a huge issue. There's also the connection with the slave trade then and the human trafficking for the scam centers now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars
Also North Korea with its state sponsored internet privateering.
Makes me imagine a buddy cop comedy but it's the US and China teaming up to deal with the scammers in Burma.
> the virtual cold war against the personal finances of foreign citizenry
Comparing a scam to war is inaccurate. The Cold War was a war running cold with the potential to go hot. Cambodia and America are not going to war over this.
Interestingly enough, China is thought to have leaned on the scales in Myanmar’s civil conflict due to pig-butchering there. (Not only were they scamming Chinese, they were also human trafficking them to operate the scams.)
China only began executing those pig-butcherers when the EAO that was providing protection to Chinese pig-butchering gangs in that region of Myanmar (Kachin Independence Army) re-flipped towards India recently [0] and had begun to ignore China [1] and rerouting rare earths and other goods to India [2]
Meanwhile, China never cracked down against similar scams in Cambodia. Most notably, Prince Group remains unsanctioned in China and it's leadership are Mainland Chinese in origin.
While pig butchering (along with opium and human trafficking and other organized crime activities) are a major reason behind Chinese involvement in Myanmar, ignoring the very real proxy war going on between Chinese and Indian interests in Myanmar fails to contextualize some of the decisions that both countries make within Myanmar.
This also explains why you don't see a similar crackdown in Cambodia, which is solidly within the Chinese sphere at this point.
[0] - https://www.stimson.org/2025/rare-earths-and-realpolitik-fut...
[1] - https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/war-against-the-junta/ignorin...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-explores-rare-eart...
> the EAO that was providing protection to Chinese pig-butchering gangs in that region of Myanmar (Kachin Independence Army)
Kachin is not a relevant location of scam centers. You can find articles that claim otherwise, e.g. https://www.ctol.digital/news/inside-worlds-largest-scam-emp... but from the fact that they mention the Thai border and the city of Myawaddy, which is in Kayin/Karen State, it's clear that they're just confusing Kachin and Kayin.
The Kachin Independence Army seems to finance itself through mining instead.
While it's true that some scammers were recently sentenced to death in China https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78nrx309kzo and this only happened after the Kachin Independence Army disrupted the rare-earth trade with China, that's just a temporal coincidence. The scammers were captured in 2023 in Laukkai in northern Shan State near the Chinese border by the MNDAA (an anti-junta armed group dominated by ethnic Chinese) as part of Operation 1027. China is rumored to have assisted the operation in order to crack down on the scam centers in junta-controlled territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_1027#Cyber-scamming_... The Kachin Independence Army also participated in Operation 1027, but in Kachin, not Shan.
I don't know about Cambodia.
The MNDAA is a close ally of the KIA as both are members of the Northern Alliance, and all the Northern Alliance members saw their relations with China tank after Chinese brokered talks with the Tatmadaw failed [0] last December.
As a result of that failure, all the Northern Alliance members began trying to pivot to other states or in the case of the MNDAA faced the brunt of the Chinese crackdown.
[0] - https://www.bnionline.net/en/news/juntamndaa-peace-talks-doo...
All of that postdates the MNDAA crackdown on scam centers, during which relations with China were excellent. It seems like after Operation 1027, the junta got the message and started handing over their own allies in the scam industry https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/myanmar-junta-transfers... at which point China didn't have much reason to continue supporting anti-junta forces in their offensive and preferred freezing the frontline with a ceasefire instead.
Maybe the reduction of Chinese support encouraged the Kachin Independence Army to seek cooperation with India, but you seemed to be claiming that causality was in the opposite direction (while also misidentifying who was running the scam centers), which I think is clearly contradicted by the timeline of events.
That's interesting - I had seen some news articles reporting that some Chinese pig butchering scammers were encouraging others to target foreigners only, and exclude the mainland Chinese. Like this one: https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/chinas-acquiescence-to...
It's reminiscent of stories about Russian malware doing nothing on machines with Cyrillic keyboard layouts.
Yep, but notice how that article is about Kokang in Myanmar as well.
Cambodia continues to have scam centers targeting Putonghua speakers (including PRC nationals), but there hasn't been a similar crackdown on such activities due to Chinese pressure.
The crackdown in Kokang happened after China flipped to supporting the Tatmadaw against the Northern Alliance [0] and India began peeling historically India-aligned members of the alliance like the KIA and the Arakan Army back into Indian orbit [1].
P.S. Circa 2 years ago, a large portion of Chinese in SF Chinatown became Kokang and Cambodian Chinese. Bamar, Kuki-Zo, and Kachin Myanmarese primarily reside in Daly City, Ingleside/Outer Mission, and Oakland/East Bay.
SF has a lot of Asian and Latiné subcultures and communities - it's kind of insane how underdocumented it is under the guise of "Asian" and "Latino"
[0] - https://www.stimson.org/2025/too-little-too-late-china-steps...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/india-extends-unp...
China does not have a way to deal with crime in Cambodia. It does not have anti-terrorism law to operate in other countries, also it does not want to upset Cambodia or Myanmar government when not necessary. These Chinese operates in Cambodia are mostly on the wanted list anyway, they don't plan to go back to China. In fact, a person leaving China to Cambodia and Myanmar will be checked and make sure their trip is innocent. Personally I hate these scammers, they have ruined so many people's lives. It seems that it will never go away. Too much money involved. I wish we can launch drone attacks on these places.
> It does not have anti-terrorism law to operate in other countries
China literally runs black ops offices in New York [1] and Australia.
> also it does not want to upset Cambodia or Myanmar government when not necessary
There is no government in Myanmar. China (and India) heavily intervene in that conflict.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/new-york-resident-pl...
> The Cold War was a war running cold with the potential to go hot
I'm not sure I buy that definition. I think most understand a Cold War to be simply a "war" done without weapons but by other means — via economic means, propaganda, etc.
that stretches the definition of war to mean anything that benefits one state over another, though. that might be a valid definition, but if we're gonna have a real discussion we're gonna have to differentiate between that sort of war and the sort of war where people kill one another with weapons and agree from the start which one we're talking about.
The US is blowing up alleged drug boats and their crews so anything is possible.
that's a pretty naive view of war. we are at war with many countries all the time, most of it is cold.
> we are at war with many countries all the time, most of it is cold
Like whom? We (and let's be honest, every other great power) are at war with many countries all of the time, and while they may be cold for long stretches, they absolutely (a) go hot from time to time and (b) are constantly threatening to go hot.
Maybe we should call it "conflict", and include non-state actors.
Let's go with macro-aggressions and put trigger warnings on them
I this similar concept, differently.
To me "war" is a state of "no rules" hurting. IE nuclear, biological, any weapon goes. Anything less is an exercise in restraint - even if still quite terrible in it's own right.
Which means there are lots of "exercises" of varying lethality, risk profiles, spheres of influence, etc. And yes many countries are jockeying against other countries in varying ways.
Large scale scams against other countries could be seen as an unintended (not a planned government action) exercise that is condoned by the government.
[dead]
It's 127,271 Bitcoins. Interesting choice not to mention the number of Bitcoins but use its current market value in USD. I feel like this says something about Bitcoin but not sure what exactly.
Edit: Wow, people really don't want to know how many Bitcoins were seized :)
What it means, is that the average person doesn't care about Bitcoin, so if you want the article to apply it the average person, you need to denominate the value in something else.
If someone stole 22 WobiBobbyBones I wouldn't care. If a WobiBobbyBone was worth a billion dollars, then I'd think that's news.
So if somebody sized a stock portfolio should they mention the number of shares? The market value is in most cases more interesting than the number of coins.
If it's a single stock portfolio yeah. If it's like 1000 different stocks then stick that information into an appendix and only use the current market value in the write-up.
It's like confiscating a Ferrari and saying you took $5 million of car parts from a drug dealer. Like instead say you confiscate 2 Ferraris with a total market value of $5 Million.
Ok but if it was 127 Ferraris I wouldn’t fault them for saying “a large collection of cars worth $500 million”
If they mention it by number of BTC then the USD value would be different for every person who read the article, in a few days it might be dramatically different. Who knows?
While the USD value is important, this puts the number in perspective, since only 21M BTC can ever exist (and a good number of them are out of circulation for various reasons).
so many hard drives in so many landfills where we thought "hell, it's only $20 in btc, hardly worth reclaiming"
I'm proud to say that I was able to acquire about $100 worth of product from the dark web using only what would turn out to be several hundred thousand dollars in bitcoin, so at least mine are still in circulation
There's a cool million in some landfill in rural MO, because I did exactly that.
It's funny to imagine how much the one "random act of pizza" I contributed multiple BTC that I mined on my Dell Dimension Pentium machine (worth multiple pennies USD then) is worth now.
I cashed out a significant amount a few years ago to help pay for an IVF attempt (sadly, it didn't work out for us, but no regrets). Obviously that amount would represent a large sum today.
On the flip side, when I was packing up our house, I found some old paper wallets that I assumed were empty (from a time when I was doing some experimentation with various scripts). One of them had about $2k in BTC, that I promptly added to our downpayment on our new house.
It is relevant, because the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve hold it in BTC, not in USD.
This is regular reporting using end-consumer market rates to inflate numbers.
Just as you could not sell 127,271 bitcoins all at once at market value, you could not just sell cocaine worth $1.4 billion but still confiscated drugs, even in large quantities, are reported with end consumer market rates. Nowadays, if a report mentions that is talking about "street value", that is already a big plus in my book.
It could be more or less meaningful depending on how long the operation has been running, I suppose. That would impact on the integral of the value that was expropriated, as of the time of expropriation.
Anecdotally, I would have thrown "127,271 BTC to USD" into Google. I didn't mind it.
It says Bitcoin is not a standard denomination. Sort of like if you are in France, and Disney bought Discovery, you would want to know the buying price in euros, not US dollars.
It's CNBC. They have to write this for people who know what a bitcoin is worth, people who know a bitcoin is a thing but have no idea what they're worth, and people who've only ever heard the phrase "bitcoin" as a series of noises. But everyone reading cnbc knows what a dollar is.
This is why crypto could never be considered a currency, even the earliest news about BTC (value, theft, pizza purchases, etc) was always reported in USD values.
But then again, so do big Eve Online battles.
No such thing as "crypto". You're intermixing form (BTC Jurisdiction state machine) with particular instance (BTC token, USDC token, whatever fungible or not)
Btw this is low-key the reason why Cambodia almost went to war with Thailand recently. In particular what's interesting is that how quickly Cambodia repurposed scam center employees as internet trolls. They're onto a really powerful golden goose here that not only brings in 15B usd but also empowers the current dictatorship. But also it's a pit of doom that is destined to erupt anytime now.
At this point its accurate to say the Cambodian leadership have completely been subjugated through corruption and that they are no longer running the country but Chinese OCGs who are affiliated with CCP and that they are probably influencing it at a state level on all matters.
We are seeing similar attempts in other Southeast Asian countries and even Korea but Cambodia seems like an outlier. It's sad that not enough of these subversive influence campaigns by China is being talked about here.
Once again, it is America leading the way and using its vast intelligence and military power to be a de-facto global police. Obviously DOJ acted because of Americans were victimized but in doing so have done what South Korean government failed to do.
Lot of heat and criticisms against South Korean government now and its embassy in Cambodia that have largely acted in negligence, even telling one of the victims to report it to Cambodian police and don't bother them.
> At this point its accurate to say the Cambodian leadership have completely been subjugated through corruption and that they are no longer running the country but Chinese OCGs who are affiliated with CCP and that they are probably influencing it at a state level on all matters.
What are some news related to this?
DOJ press release.[1] DOJ claims custody of US$15 billion in Bitcoin. "Largest forfeiture action in the history of the Department of Justice."
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chairman-prince-group-indicte...
Looks like the US is getting a "national Bitcoin reserve" without even trying.
I'm curious how the Bitcoin was actually seized, given that the indictment says the perp is still at large and held the Bitcoin in self custodied wallets.
He has the key written on a piece of paper in his wallet. The US government has his wallet. And his Bitcoin.
So he was effectively carrying $15B in his wallet? That's insane. I don't even carry more than $100 cash.
Rookie numbers
$15B is a mind-blowing amount. I came here just to make sure it wasn't an M to B typo.
This sounds very much like the operation described in the book Number Go Up, which is ostensibly about FTX, but is really about a number of crypto operations which may or may not be illegal
I don't understand how he was savvy and organized enough to operate such a massive operation and yet didn't manage to secure his $15 billion crypto wallet... Amazing.
The point of bitcoin was that it can't be taken off you by the state. So either this was severe user error, to the tune of why aren't the keys somewhere secure when there's a billion dollars behind them, or the nominal reason for bitcoin existing is nonsense.
We thinking user error or crypto is nonsense? On the forum I expect the former.
Unless you are suggesting that the encryption algorithms underlying Bitcoin have been broken (which would be absolutely huge news with all sorts of far reaching consequences), then it's clearly the former.
> The point of bitcoin was that it can't be taken off you by the state.
The point of a "pig butchering scam" is that victims are socially engineered into giving their assets (in this case, bitcoin) to someone else.
you're right but that's not what we're talking about. we're talking about someone among the social engineers that made a mistake which allowed the DoJ to seize the btc.
Reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/
With bitcoin you can't even just rely on memory for the keys, you need something physical that can be taken away from you.
Not really. Hardware makes it easier to manage, but anyone with the private key can access the coins at a given address.
Of course, private keys are practically unmemorizable, but you can restore a Bitcoin wallet with your seed phrase.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Seed_phrase
Crypto is nonsense for a lot of its stated purposes once you strip away the shared delusions that have been propped up by us living in a fairly stable global society that at least goes through the motions of supporting the rule of law (though this is obviously changing quickly in some places recently).
But then again holding some piece of paper (or a database entry) that says you own some gold that you don't actually have in your possession is equally nonsense that also works until it doesn't.
If you don't pay your debts or taxes then even items that you own and which are in your possession can be taken from you, thanks to the rule of law. Conversely, if someone comes along and takes it from you without legal justification, the rule of law allows you to claim it back. That same rule of law ensures that you are entitled to the gold you own that isn't in your possession.
Drawing the line at possession is arbitrary. Either way your ownership is governed by law, and is only as good as the strength of that law.
From this article they got $15B (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/bitcoin-doj-chen-zhi-pig-but...). At what point do you say, "That's enough money?" Did they think the scam was going to go on forever?
I'm not sure if one can merely walk away from a criminal enterprise of that size. As soon as you stop paying certain people you end up in a cage, and unless the stream of money is constant there is no reason to just not reneg on all prior agreements and go in a cage for stuff you already paid authorities off for.
> As soon as you stop paying certain people you end up in a cage
You end up dead because your co-conspirators don't want to end up in a cage.
So the whole crypto anonymity thing isn’t actually real? As it turns out, tracing people is still easier than tracing money? Decentralized economies are run by criminal enterprises?! We aren’t safe!?!
Wonder how this whole concept overlays onto LLMs, with a lot more money on the line and a lot less regulation.
You're probably joking, but even if crypto was totally anonymous, running a massive criminal human trafficking empire in the real world is very non-anonymous.
Good old police work still works. Because people need to talk to each other to do stuff. The only time anonymity helps is if you can pull it all off solo, and mix the funds enough to not be traced as well as cover tracks well enough.
Crypto anonymity is still possible if you don't plan to spend your ill-gotten millions or billions particularly quickly. But, of course, you don't get to having a massive active criminal empire that way.
At that scale, you have massive influence within the Cambodian government, so you're not worried about "getting caught" in the traditional sense.
You still have to worry about falling out with the government or then caving to foreign pressure and selling you off to appease a foreign power.
These scams have enormous scale. The Economist has a fascinating podcast about it. The full series requires a subscription, but it is worth at least listening to the first 3 free episodes. https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc
Had they thought $1B was enough they would have missed out on $14B.
I think the implication is they could have stayed under the radar and still have that $1B.
Chances are they still have a lot of the money scammed, just not those particular 15B.
In a way it's like with an overfunded startup: when at some point in time the music stops because even the last would-be investor realized that the business will never be profitable, the company collapses. But all those paychecks received for playing with Other People's Money don't magically return.
> Did they think the scam was going to go on forever?
You underestimate the intensity of human greed.
They have shareholders who bought the shares for more than the company annual revenue and expect infinite potential of profits to justify the price they paid
If DOJ knows the destination wallets can they trace the transactions ...
into the wallets back to the victims?
from the wallets forward to the others working with the scammer?
So apparently the FBI or other US agency hacked this guy and drained his wallets? No indication he’s been arrested, wallets said to be unhosted.
Clearly should’ve used an offline wallet lol.
It may not be a hack, but a warrant like 'Hey Google, give us access to this guy's Gmail.'
You can’t get a warrant for a bitcoin wallet right?
A surprising number of 'sophisticated' criminals backup their seed phrase to the cloud.
The article mentions seed phrases being saved by the owner. What if he saved them online?
https://xkcd.com/538/
They did not physically catch the owners apparently.
What happens if it doesn't work?
If it was a last resort and it didn't work, then we wouldn't be in this thread...
You move to the screwdriver
Taylor is on to something here: https://x.com/tayvano_/status/1978273602719158448
tl;dr: Someone cracked these weak entropy wallets 3+ years before anyone else and kept it secret
Whether that was the USG or another entity has yet to be revealed
Please use xcancel: https://xcancel.com/tayvano_/status/1978273602719158448 when linking to X since a lot of us don't have accounts or just don't want to log in.
After having read the thread it's not clear to me where the "3 years" comes from ?
EDIT and were the keys cracked, or were the passphrases obtained ? It's mentioned elsewhere that he had them written down. Which would be a much easier "hack"
Risky move, since it is easy to move the funds to a new address at any time.
Criminal podcast shared the story of one of the forced workers at scamming camp in Myanmar: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-332-the-compound-9-12-202...
Scam, Inc from The Economist is worth the subscription for 1 month. Very in depth.
https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc
Wow, maybe we should use this to pay our ATC
Is it actually usable, sellable Bitcoin worth $15B? Or is it some kind of storage that the owner couldn't really use easily for some reason?
$15B of real wealth is a large amount even for a powerful family, so I am surprised it's not a headline news in global media.
The forfeiture complaint [1] says:
> Chen personally maintained records of the wallet addresses and seed phrases associated with the private keys for each.
So it sounds like they have the seed phrases and thus the private keys.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...
is Chen in custody?
If not, why wouldn't he just transfer the funds to a new seed?
All the wallets were drained years ago and [1] says the bitcoin "are already in the government’s possession, custody and control".
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...
I would love to see a new take on "James Bond" (or similar franchise? new franchise?) — one that is realistic and instead sees our spy move through these modern domains of illegal money instead of battling the clichéd Cold War villains with their Persian cats.
China did it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets
That's more of a crime film than a spy film. Worth watching though!
Thanks.
Sounds like good news but the press release doesn't detail how the FBI managed to trace, positively identify and then seize such a huge pile of crypto ($15B) from a suspect they say took extensive steps to launder and hide the source and ownership of the crypto. I'm curious because this guy is clearly very experienced, highly sophisticated and located in a country where the government and law enforcement are obviously tacitly protecting him.
So did the U.S. hack this guy? Anyone who manages to build such a massive multi-national corporation with myriad illicit businesses but also dozens of legitimate businesses with thousands of employees - including a large bank with over 100,000 customers - and then operate it all for over a decade, doesn't strike me as someone who's trivially careless. I mean he managed to successfully protect that much money for a long time from his own criminal co-conspirators (who would certainly include hackers with insider knowledge of his operations), criminal competitors and all the people he was bribing like senior Cambodian politicians, law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
This just strikes me as either a very lucky break or a perhaps a sign that the FBI is adopting a new playbook to go after shielded international operations like this. Like maybe involving U.S. and 'Five Eyes' intelligence assets.
"but the press release doesn't detail how the FBI managed to trace, positively identify and then seize such a huge pile of crypto ($15B) from a suspect they say took extensive steps"
Am I slow??? or what under circumstance that you expect FBI to told press how their operate????
I am also curious how the US government obtained possession of the bitcoin if the defendant is still at large. Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of bitcoin?
According to Ars Technica: "Adding further mystery, it’s unknown how federal officials managed to obtain the cryptographic keys required to seize the funds from Zhi."
My assumption is that at this point they just have orders from a judge allowing them to do it and they will find the means later.
Allowing them to do what? The feds are saying they already have the keys, so either they are lying, or they already had the means to get the keys. Which would be the juicy part of the story.
> they already had the means to get the keys.
Yes, and the other big questions are how they even know about the existence of the bitcoin and then how they were able to demonstrate sufficient probable cause to a judge that A) the bitcoin belongs to the suspect, and B) this bitcoin is the direct proceeds of the charged crimes. Given the extremely unusual circumstances around this seizure, its unprecedented size and the complete lack of details - I suspect something new and interesting has happened here.
Unfortunately, we may never find out unless they manage to arrest the suspect, which seems unlikely. The more interesting scenario might be if the Prince Group files suit challenging the seizure. In that case, the government would not only have to produce evidence proving A and B above, but also that the evidence wasn't obtained illegally (like from secret NSA wiretaps on domestic Cambodian telecoms or targeted covert hacking). Given the circumstances, it's hard to imagine the FBI being able to offer plausible 'parallel construction' to support the legality of the evidence.
Finding a judge who does not really understand what Bitcoin is won't be too hard. All your "evidence wasn't obtained illegally" and so on are questions impossiblec to ask without a reasonable amount of knowledge. Requirements of a judge order aren't really much of a bar to jump, hardly more than a four eyes formality.
There exist a number of possibilities, all of which are equally likely
1. they are lying. The most obvious one. It's legal and is expected that law enforcement lie in the United States.
2. defendant was so dumb he had the funds in a crypto exchange account
3. Law enforcement has no idea what keys or crypto is. Also likely, law enforcement in the US is not required to be competent.
4. defendant was so dumb he landed on a flight in the US. This would be exceptionally stupid
5. The US military or the intelligence community either coerced the keys out of him or just beat the keys out of him. There are no jurisdictional issues with this approach. From what I understand this guy isn't very popular in any country, so few countries would care. Even fewer would want to publicly discuss how their sovereignty was violated
6. A random member of the criminal organization had access to most but not all of the keys. He showed up at a US embassy and said "well I did lots of bad stuff. I'd like to disappear now & not at a location named Guantanmo! How about we cut a deal"
My personal bet is on #3. It's effectively impossible for anyone to prove they don't have the keys. The only person who could do that would the defendant, who has no interest in doing so.
Good reply. While #2 and #4 are certainly possible, I find it hard to believe this guy gets this far for this long without being sufficiently paranoid and street smart.
I think the most likely is a combo variant of #5 and #6. Maybe the USG (or a cooperating government) got leverage on one of his lieutenants - like lieutenant's adult kid goes to NYC to party for a weekend with friends without telling daddy and despite it being against dad's rules. USG quietly holds the kid under some immigration pretext (much easier these days) and forces the lieutenant to put a USB thumb drive in his boss's 'special' PC.
Alternatively, a probable weak point with most overtly criminal kingpins who accumulate literal billions is they really can't trust anyone around them to not steal it. So the guy probably has to keep the crypto keys to his 'big wad' physically with him on a mobile device or memory stick, maybe protected only by a password short enough he can remember it. In that scenario, the USG just does a 'sneak and peek' and images the device, maybe while the guy is transiting a third country. Then it's just a matter of either using one of the NSA's tier 1 vulns on the mobile device image or deploying the NSA's super-computer farm to crack the 'human-memorable' password. If so, it would have been much smarter for the guy to control access to the 'big wad' with split keys separated on multiple devices - and only keep one required part around his neck. Then neither the 'sneak and peak' nor the 'crowbar to the balls' methods would work.
In any of those scenarios, the very interesting part is it shows the Trump admin and Trump's new FBI head Kash Patel are willing to cross some new lines which haven't been publicly crossed before - like using secret intelligence assets for purely criminal enforcement. Note: I think the USG has done this before but it's been pretty rare and always been in ways that were unseen or otherwise deniable, because the CIA/NSA have been extremely resistant to using their best toys for fear of losing their best toys. I suspect the Trump admin has crushed this resistance. A potentially relevant fact is Kash Patel was previously on the National Security Council during Trump's first term, so he'd be familiar with intel assets. Obviously, in the near-term that's bad news for a handful of major international criminals and in the long-term it may be bad for US intelligence capabilities (as the reasons for CIA/NSA resistance weren't baseless).
Quite possible they hacked the device they were stored on. I can't find confirmation that Chen has actually been arrested, as opposed to being charged in absentia.
That is because he has not been arrested, the US government website linked above says the defendant is at large.
According to the indictment:
> Those funds (the Defendant Cryptocurrency) are presently in the custody of the U.S. government.
> The defendant and his co-conspirators subsequently used some of the criminal proceeds for luxury travel and entertainment and to make extravagant purchases such as watches, yachts, private jets, vacation homes, high-end collectables, and rare artwork, including a Picasso painting purchased through an auction house in New York City.
My guess some of defendants were in New York or around the US. You can be a criminal master mind and also be a complete f*king idiot.
I guess they have a quantum computer.
The DOJ article is far more informative than the CNBC article. Chen Zhi, the alleged perpetrator, remains at large.
Do they force you to reveal your private keys?
After obtaining the bitcoins, are they forced to sell it immediately? How does this affect the market?
Typically, they need to get a conviction in court to actually do anything with the seized funds. At the moment, they don't even have the guy in custody.
Bitcoin market cap is $2.2T, so $15B of that is 0.7% of all bitcoins. They aren't selling them on open market, but in an auction (or a couple of auctions). It may not have an immediate influence on the bitcoin price, unless the buyer sells them right away. When someone sells an amount that big, it's done over a long period of time, to not crash the market (you'd probably get significantly less money if you sold it fast).
> Once they did, however, the marshals fell back on standard procedure, preparing to handle the Bitcoin the same way they would a coke smuggler’s speedboat: by auctioning it off. That posed challenges because of the sheer size of the seizure—about 175,000 Bitcoins, or 2% of all the Bitcoin in circulation at the time. According to a prosecutor familiar with the case, the marshals opted for a staggered series of auctions to avoid crashing Bitcoin’s price. In four auctions between June 2014 and November 2015, the marshals sold the Silk Road Bitcoins for an average price of $379. (https://fortune.com/crypto/2018/02/21/government-forfeiture-...)
There were also some bitcoins seized from a hacker that stole them from Silk Road in 2013, and when they seized it in 2020 it was worth $1B, now it's worth $6.5B. Nice profit for the government. https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/09/federal-government-all...
> Bitcoin market cap is $2.2T, so $15B of that is 0.7% of all bitcoins.
Famously illiquid though.
> After obtaining the bitcoins, are they forced to sell it immediately? How does this affect the market?
Other way around, by executive order they're forced to hold it in a sovereign wealth fund.
Through my mind... either they do deals less for prison time. $15bn for some freedom. Or they do something "extrajudicial" with a $5 wrench.
As I understand it, they persuade their marks to transfer bitcoin to accounts they control.
And this isn't the only one.
The ruling family in Cambodia is a big part of it, via their ownership in HuiOne (now renamed), which is essentially the clearing house for the 'industry'.
In fact the Thai-Cambodia border conflict is due to this industry, and a breakdown in the relationship between Thai and Cambodian leaders over it, with the wiley cambodian leader yet again provoking the sensitive border issue for political gain.
No, it was a "Russia invading Ukraine" sized miscalculation. The "wily" Cambodian leader's military got their asses handed to them by the Thai army, and Cambodia is suffering a lot more from the still ongoing border closure than Thailand is. Remittances, tourism, trade, you name it, it's all in the doldrums. (Good time to visit Angkor Wat if you can swing it, though.)
I'm living in Thailand and been following scam centers for years now. It's 100% the scam center fallout mixed with regional politics.
Cambodia is fully commited to scam centers and Thailand doesn't like that and even reached out to Xi directly for cooperation here. Not even a year later the conflict broke.
Finally, cambodia is not suffering at all and if anything the current dictator has become significantly stronger and the country has been on a huge nationalist rise as the dictators control the scam centers and easily repurpose them for online propaganda.
Cambodian people are suffering, no doubt about it, but what you say about the surge in nationalism and entrenching his position is certainly true; the 'leadership' has only gotten stronger.
It's surreal how Cambodians are blindly, even passionately, following the government narrative of evil rapacious Thailand invading innocent peace-loving Cambodia, when there is strong evidence showing it was Cambodia provoking the issue to meddle in Thai politics, but there is such deep-seated pride (on both sides I think) that truth is disregarded.
Militarily you are right, but remember war is politics by other means.
Thailand's Thaksin is now in jail and his daughter, basically his avatar, has been removed from government. Mission accomplished.
And to get a sense of how powerful this scam industry is in the country, the latest news is of a young Korean murdered after being kidnapped by a scam gang. Korea has responded forcefully, calling out the danger, yet the Cambodian press is now full of accusations that Korea is defaming Cambodia, that they are just as guilty of human-trafficking Cambodian brides, that some Koreans who were 'rescued' from a scam center don't actually want to go home, that the international press are unfairly treating Cambodia ... you know the story by now.
I had never heard of "pig butchering".
> The practice is called “pig butchering” because scammers deliberately build up trust and emotionally manipulate victims over an extended period—much like fattening up a pig—before ultimately stealing as much money as possible in a final act of financial “slaughter”
I can highly recommend a recent series of podcasts by The Economist on precisely this topic https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2025/02/06/1-pigs-in-a-ba...
It's a direct translation of the Chinese 杀猪.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam
And it's a bad expression, because it's the scammers own smug term of contempt, and makes victims less likely to come forward/warn each other thanks to the shame.
It's a huge deal in China, though Europeans are starting to get targeted as well.
It boggles my mind that people like this don't set up multi-sig wallets using hardware devices that are physically not in the same location.
See my other comment in the thread.
In my experience, folks who dabble in crypto and even seasoned users always underestimate how hard and tricky of a problem proper self-custody actually is.
And when they do think about it, it's always too late.
And by the way, multi-sig is not the only thing you want to be thinking about.
Cold walletting is another that most people miss.
Also, avoiding concentrating a large number of coins on a small number of addresses (not that I know this was done in the cast of this scam) is another thing most people miss when in fact this was from day one listed as bad practice by IIRC Satoshi himself.
And finally, to mention the standard counter-argument to self-custody: the $5 pipe wrench attack only works if the attackers know the coins exist.
For those interested in plumbing the depth of the problem, the glacier protocol is a good place to start:
https://glacierprotocol.org/
Just curious, how will you sieze bitcoin?
Get the private key and send a transaction transferring the sum to a new wallet for which you are sure only your agency knows the private key.
Since in pig butchering scams the victims often do not go to the police or tell anyone due to feelings of shame, we can assume quite a big pot of that money will go into the US federal crypto reserve.
I am shocked that the organizer of a large scam call center in SEAsia is a Chinese national.
Large scam call centers run by Chinese nationals are getting broken up in the region pretty regularly.
I see multiple factors here:
- There's a lot of Chinese people in the region (1.3b vs <20M in Cambodia)
- Better access to capital for setting up big operations like this
- Much tighter control and policing in their homeland, so the scammers operate elsewhere
Glad they got somewhere with that. It's a bit shocking some of the stuff that goes on out there.
legendary shiny DoJ w
So in these cases of government seizing bitcoin, the people they seize from have unencrypted private keys?
The article just says "private keys the defendant had in his possession" does this mean he was holding onto private keys that had no passwords / encryption at all that unlocked $15B?
Or does the government have an alternative way of "seizing" bitcoin? I remember years ago people throwing around conspiracy theories that bitcoin was invented by the NSA / other 3 letter agencies with a backdoor to basically allow easy tracking / seizure of criminal assets.
Im not a conspiracy theorist, but stories like these were the government seems so easy to seize such incredibly large amounts of money so easily seems to suggest some other mechanisms that aren't public.
The forfeiture complaint [1] says:
> Chen personally maintained records of the wallet addresses and seed phrases associated with the private keys for each.
So he wrote the passwords down, basically.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...
They should not have revealed these details... now criminals know how to avoid this.
Where did he write the passwords that the us govt. seized them exactly?
I wish there is a way for the scam victims to claim some money back. That would be awesome.
Yes it would!
Meanwhile, our current leadership will probably just wire it over to Argentina
> Zhi and a network of top executives in the Prince Group are accused of using political influence in multiple countries to protect their criminal enterprise and paid bribes to public officials to avoid actions by law enforcement authorities targeting the scheme, according to prosecutors.
Gentle reminder that the presence of a strong democratic regime with law and no bribes keeps the world a better place.
Once the US becomes corrupted at this scale we are doomed to this bullshit.
Already past that, I'm afraid. With the Presidential cryptocurrency and the lack of investigation into Supreme Court finances, it's going to be grift all the way down.
I'm not sure how you can pull out of it without jailing a significant fraction of the Republican party (and quite a few elderly Democrats). Plenty of people around Trump got jailed and that didn't make a difference.
how does one seize bitcoins? presumably he left them on an exchange? not your keys, not your crypto.
wonder what they’ll spend it on
Would these money be returned to the victims?
Unfortunately, in pig butchering scams the victims often feel ashamed and wouldn't claim their stake.
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Why would the government bother prosecuting/seizing it if the money was going to the victims?
That’s how it’s supposed to work. But these days who knows.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®"
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
There is a small sense of irony reading the first 3 sentences before the paywall pops up and stops me from reading it entirely.
We basically have that in the US except the government has a monopoly on the police force. The libertarian police corp would be infinitely better as at least there would be competition for police services.
Um maybe because the government isn't supposed to work for profit but to enforce the law and do the right thing for victims and society?
If they're going to be only prosecuting crimes where there's something in it for them it's going to be a very unsafe society.
What about good old asset forfeiture to buy more swat toys?
Welcome to the world
Welcome to the US maybe. Here in Europe it's not like that, though there's certainly stuff going wrong. But not this, really.
Related:
U.S. Sanctions Cambodian Conglomerate, Citing Role in 'Pig-Butchering' Scams
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584418
Thanks, we'll merge that thread hither
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When BTC goes down, altcoins typically also go down, so it would have a negative effect on $TRUMP.
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Wonder if Musk will be protesting, those seizures could put a dent in SpaceX earnings https://www.barrons.com/news/myanmar-scam-cities-booming-des...
It’s only technically incorrect to suggest that Musk should protest over the recent $15B scam profit seizure—it was from Cambodian scams, whereas the compounds that reportedly had to switch to Starlink due to being disconnected from the Internet are in Myanmar[0]—but yes, it’s still unclear why would Musk not shut any of it down if they have the capability (and if they don’t, then it’s another interesting controversy).
[0] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/starlink--an-internet-l...
Who they were scamming, Americans? How they managed to gain trust, even considering strong accent or grammatical mistakes. How do they identify and trace these Chinese fraudsters? They all look the same and have a name like Hi Lo. Where the money go... of course real estate.
this should answer some of your questions: https://youtu.be/vu-Y1h9rTUs
Sad to see so many Ukrainians sucked into these schemes as employees.
With the recent insane moves in quantum stocks almost makes me wonder if there’s a possibility the NSA or other USG agency is far enough ahead of publicly known capabilities in quantum computing to brute force private keys/break encryption and this info is leaking into markets.
Of course the more likely explanation is that this was a sophisticated albeit classical hack (infrastructure, social engineering, surveillance, whatever) and the quantum run-up is unrelated retail investor hysteria, but have to consider the possibility the market knows something I don’t. If the government stays far ahead enough of private industry at some point in the coming years (or decades) the USG will break encryption without public disclosure unless quantum resistant algs are put in place before that capability is achieved. Hopefully this more exotic implausibility isn’t the explanation, but entertaining to consider, and history is bizarre enough for it to be true.
I would go with the likely explanation here.
I certainly do. If I really thought such a fringe explanation was anything more than highly improbable I don’t think I would feel comfortable even mentioning it at all. Still I find it a worthwhile exercise to consider outlier scenarios. The real story of course is probably even more bizarre and fascinating but I’m not sure we’ll get the declassified details this century of how the USG pulled off the biggest heist from heisters ever.