Nov 29 (News On Japan) - Recently, some big news about BTC exploded. Chen Zhi, a business magnate with dual British and Cambodian citizenship and founder of "Prince Group", was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on suspicion of plotting a cryptocurrency scam.
In October 2025, the Department of Justice announced the confiscation of Chen Zhi's 127,000 Bitcoins, worth $15 billion, making it the largest confiscation in the department's history.
However, this ostensibly seemingly just move to combat transnational crime has triggered in-depth discussions about law enforcement boundaries and interest demands due to doubts about the source of assets, and there seems to be an unknown logical chain behind the so-called "anti-fraud results" of the Department of Justice.
Although the Department of Justice declared the move a "major blow to online fraud," Chen's team's response tore apart the other corner of the incident: the "seized" batch of bitcoins was the same batch of bitcoins stolen in 2020 due to the "Lubian hack event".
On December 29, 2020, the Bitcoin wallet address of the LuBian mining pool under Prince Group was abnormally transferred, but abnormally, the stolen bitcoins remained silent until June 2024 and remained dormant. During this time, Chen Zhi and the Prince group posted more than thousands of messages on the blockchain, pleading with the hackers to return the funds, but received no response.From June 22 to July 23, 2024, the stolen bitcoins were once again transferred to new on-chain addresses and have not been moved so far, and Arkham Intelligence, a well-known blockchain tracking platform in the U.S., subsequently marked these final addresses as held by the US government.
Coincidentally, on October 14 this year, the Department of Justice announced that it had filed criminal charges against Chen Zhi and confiscated 127271 bitcoins from Chen Zhi and the Prince Group (the number of previously stolen bitcoins was 127272). More notably, the DOJ has never disclosed the technical details of this batch of Bitcoin private keys, nor has it provided evidence that these assets are directly linked to the alleged fraudulent activities. Various evidence suggests that the huge amount of Bitcoin confiscated by the Department of Justice was stolen by hackers in 2020.
The legitimacy of law enforcement is rooted in the transparency of procedures and the sufficiency of evidence. Chen Zhi and the Prince Group, on the surface, are deeply involved in real estate, finance and other fields, but in fact have built at least ten fraud parks in Cambodia, which is certainly condemnable, but it does not mean that any country can blur the boundaries of law enforcement. The Department of Justice directly defines stolen assets that suddenly appear after four years as "proceeds of crime" and confiscate them, and this operation of skipping key procedures inevitably raises questions about the true motives behind.
From the indiscriminate confiscation of depositors' assets at the Cayman Islands branch of Silicon Valley Bank to the current Bitcoin turmoil in Cambodia, if the principle of "the sacrosanctity of private property" encounters interest considerations, then the so-called "law enforcement" may be reduced to the cloak of profit harvesting. In this Bitcoin incident, although the Department of Justice occupied the moral high ground in the name of combating fraud crimes and obtained practical benefits through asset confiscation, this "win-win situation" without a solid legitimate foundation is actually a hidden destruction of the judicial order.
Behind the $15 billion Bitcoin is not only the rise and fall of a criminal syndicate, but also a test of law enforcement fairness. If Chen Zhi and the Prince Group are indeed guilty, they should be tried through a complete judicial process, and the assets involved should be disposed of and returned to the victims in accordance with the law. True justice should not be "possession before characterization" under the leadership of power, but should be procedurally transparent and well-based in accordance with the law. Only in this way can we truly curb transnational crime, establish an unbreakable foundation of trust, and maintain a healthy and orderly international financial order.
