Taipei prosecutors have indicted 62 individuals and 13 businesses linked to the Prince Group — a transnational “pig butchering” network — after seizing $174 million out of a total of $339 million laundered through Taiwan’s financial system.
Taiwan has issued indictments against 62 individuals and 13 businesses in one of the largest cryptocurrency-related money laundering cases ever in the region, targeting the Prince Group—a transnational criminal network officially identified by the U.S. Department of Justice. Among those indicted is Chen Zhi, the group's chairman and alleged mastermind, who was extradited from Cambodia to China earlier this year.
According to the indictment, approximately US$339 million — equivalent to New Taiwan Dollars 10.8 billion — was channeled through Taiwan's financial system via shell companies, luxury goods transactions, sports cars, real estate, online gambling, and underground money transfer channels. Authorities have so far seized approximately US$174 million.
Prosecutors allege the group used Taiwanese citizens as tools to conduct domestic transactions to conceal the origin and movement of illicit funds — a common tactic in large-scale cross-border money laundering networks.
Pig butchering — a global crime model worth tens of billions of dollars.
Prince Group is accused of operating scam centers in Cambodia that used forced labor to implement a “pig butchering” scheme—a method in which criminals build trust with victims over a long period before persuading them to invest in fraudulent cryptocurrency platforms, then stealing all the money.
Last October, Chen Zhi himself was indicted in federal court in Brooklyn on charges of conspiracy to commit fraud via telecommunications and conspiracy to launder money. Simultaneously, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York and the National Security Agency filed a civil lawsuit seeking to seize 127,271 BTC — then worth approximately $15 billion — XEM the largest asset seizure in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The overall picture regarding the scale of this type of crime is alarming. Deddy Lavid, CEO of blockchain analytics platform Cyvers, said the company has identified approximately 27,000 criminal groups operating under a “pig butchering” model globally, with estimated total losses and illicit value flows of around $27.5 billion. Last year, Interpol upgraded its alert level and officially designated Southeast Asian fraud centers as a global security threat.
International response is intensifying but has yet to keep pace with the growth of criminal networks. In 2025, the Office of Foreign Asset Control of the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on 19 organizations in Myanmar and Cambodia, aiming to dismantle operations that caused more than $10 billion in losses to victims in 2024 alone.
Last month, an inter-agency task force established to address the issue announced the freezing or seizure of approximately $580 million in cryptocurrency assets. The prosecution in Taiwan, with its scale and cross-border coordination, demonstrates that judicial authorities are gradually shifting from a passive response to a proactive crackdown strategy — though the road ahead remains long.
