The FBI has carried out its largest cryptocurrency seizure in history, more than $8 billion, while arresting hundreds of suspects and freeing nearly 2,000 trafficking victims in a sweeping intercontinental operation targeting organized crime syndicates that prey on American citizens.
The crackdown, dubbed Operation Blackout, spanned at least four separate operations across Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Dubai, and other locations in Africa and the Middle East. FBI Director Kash Patel framed the effort as a direct warning to criminal networks worldwide.
The scale is staggering. In a single arrest, that of Chen Zhi, CEO of Cambodia-based Prince Holding Group, the FBI confiscated more than 127,000 bitcoin, valued at roughly $15 billion at the time of seizure. Chen Zhi now faces federal charges of wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. His company allegedly ran guarded compounds across multiple countries, Fox News reported.
Patel made clear these operations are not small-time phone scams. In a statement, the FBI director laid out the nature of the threat:
“Scam compounds are not just call centers. They are organized criminal enterprises built to steal from Americans, launder money, and exploit people at scale.”
The compounds operate on a model that combines financial fraud with human trafficking. Syndicates lure workers with promises of good income and work visas, then force them to run scams under threat of beatings or worse. The FBI freed nearly 2,000 of these trafficked workers across the various operations.
One FBI official told Fox News Digital that the bureau has been prioritizing this crackdown for the past 12 months. The official described a single case in which one American lost $3 million to a romance scheme. Other fraud operations have been linked to multiple suicides, particularly extortion schemes targeting teenagers.
That kind of human toll, measured in lives destroyed, not just dollars lost, is what makes this more than a white-collar enforcement story. These are violent criminal organizations with global reach, and until recently, they operated with near-total impunity.
Operation Blackout encompassed at least four named operations, each targeting a different node in the global scam network.
Operation Zephyr Exodus focused on the Prince Holding Group in Cambodia. Operation Sand Dollar targeted scam compounds in Dubai, where local police and the FBI arrested 275 people. Six of those suspects will be extradited to the United States to face federal charges. Each of nine Dubai compounds allegedly generated $6 million per year in fraud proceeds.
In Myanmar, Operation Haochen zeroed in on the Tai Chang scam compound in Kyaukhat, a region controlled by the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army, an armed militia with alleged ties to the Chinese mob. The U.S. government designated the DKBA a transnational criminal organization, and the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the group for prior large-scale scamming operations. The FBI seized $30 million tied to Tai Chang and other compounds.
A fourth operation, the Shunda Compound Takedown, was a joint task force with Thai law enforcement. In Thailand, the FBI seized thousands of smartphones and office equipment from a scam operation. Multinational trafficking victims were rescued via the Moei River in Phop Phra District, Tak province, on February 12, 2025. By February 26, victims from the KK Park compound, a fraud factory and human trafficking hub on the Thailand-Myanmar border operated by the Karen Border Guard Force, were freed after a multinational crackdown.
The DOJ has pursued similar international crypto fraud crackdowns in recent months, but the scope of Operation Blackout dwarfs prior efforts.
One of the more notable elements of the operation involved Elon Musk’s Starlink. The satellite internet company partnered with the FBI to provide geolocation data that helped identify scammers using Starlink terminals. Starlink subsequently suspended more than 7,000 terminals in Myanmar alone.
The partnership underscores how deeply embedded these criminal networks have become in modern technology infrastructure. They are not operating out of back rooms with rotary phones. They run sophisticated, tech-enabled operations, and dismantling them requires cooperation across both government and the private sector.
The United States Institute of Peace estimates that criminal syndicates of this kind steal approximately $64 billion annually worldwide. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received nearly 72,000 complaints in 2025 detailing losses of more than $7.5 billion related to cryptocurrency investment fraud, and the bureau believes actual losses are higher.
That gap between reported and actual losses matters. It reflects both the shame victims feel and the sophistication of schemes designed to keep people from realizing they’ve been defrauded until it’s too late.
Not all of the FBI’s work was reactive. Operation Level Up, a proactive initiative, identified victims of cryptocurrency investment fraud and notified them before they lost more money. The operation reached 8,935 victims. A full 77 percent of those notified had no idea they were being scammed.
The effort prevented an estimated $562 million in additional losses. That figure alone justifies the program’s existence, and raises the question of why this kind of proactive fraud prevention wasn’t standard practice years ago.
Director Patel has consistently signaled that the FBI under his leadership intends to be aggressive in going after those who target Americans, whether through violence or fraud.
Patel’s statement on Operation Blackout left no room for ambiguity:
“The FBI has been leading the charge, from taking down Prince Group in Cambodia to Operation Sand Dollar in Dubai. We helped free nearly 2,000 trafficked workers, shut down more than $8 billion in scam center fraud, and arrested nearly 300 people.”
He added a direct message to criminal networks abroad:
“If you target Americans, we will find you, disrupt your network, and bring every available tool of the federal government down on you.”
The dollar figures are eye-catching. But the FBI’s description of how these compounds operate tells a darker story. Workers trafficked into these facilities are held against their will and forced to conduct fraud under threat of physical violence. The victims on the other end, American retirees, teenagers, lonely people looking for connection, lose savings, dignity, and in some cases their lives.
Romance scams, cryptocurrency cons, and extortion schemes are not victimless crimes. They are industrial-scale predation. And the organizations running them, groups like the DKBA and the Prince Holding Group, are not rogue actors. They are structured criminal enterprises with international reach, political protection in their home regions, and billions of dollars at stake.
The fact that financial fraud at every scale continues to flourish, from million-dollar domestic schemes to billion-dollar international operations, reflects a persistent enforcement gap that the FBI is now working to close.
Several open questions remain. The FBI has not named most of the hundreds arrested. The breakdown of the $8 billion seizure across individual operations is unclear beyond the $30 million tied to Tai Chang. Details on the six Dubai suspects facing extradition, including their identities and specific charges, have not been released. And the compounds in Africa and the Middle East that the FBI says are tied to Chinese organized crime remain unnamed.
Federal investigators have also been ramping up probes across multiple fronts, signaling a broader enforcement posture under the current FBI leadership.
For years, these scam compounds operated in the open, protected by corrupt local officials, shielded by geography, and ignored by an international law enforcement community that treated them as someone else’s problem. Operation Blackout is the clearest signal yet that the FBI considers them America’s problem, and intends to treat them accordingly.
When criminal enterprises steal billions from American citizens and enslave thousands of workers to do it, the only appropriate federal response is the one Patel described: find them, shut them down, and make the consequences real.
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