Bitcoin looks dead… but is it

You’re having lunch with a friend, just chatting about random stuff, when their eyes suddenly light up.

“Omg, bro, I almost forgot – I found the best crypto investment app ever. You HAVE to check this out.”

You roll your eyes a little. You’ve heard this pitch before.

Still, curiosity wins, so you take a look at their phone. And… weirdly enough, it looks legit. Clean interface, graphs going up, real-time profits that make your savings account feel like a joke.

You decide to give it a try. It even lets you withdraw money at first. Feels safe enough, right?

Then one day, you log in – and the site’s gone. Your crypto? Gone. The “friend” who told you about it? Gone x3.

That exact experience – just scaled up to thousands of victims – is at the heart of what US prosecutors say was one of the largest online scams ever uncovered.

The US government announced it had seized over $14B in Bitcoin from Chen Zhi, a Chinese-born businessman and chairman of Prince Holding Group in Cambodia, who authorities say ran a massive pig butchering scam.

Chen’s network allegedly built fake crypto trading apps and websites that looked exactly like real exchanges.

Victims thought they were investing in crypto, saw balances go up, got fake transaction receipts, and could even make small withdrawals – all part of the trap.

Once the victims were “fattened up” – investing more, telling friends, feeling confident – the sites froze their accounts or disappeared overnight.

And a very dark part of this scheme is that it was being run out of scam compounds in Southeast Asia, where many of the workers were forced or trafficked into scamming.

At its peak, Chen’s operation was allegedly pulling in around $30M a day.

And this week, investigators traced and seized $14B in Bitcoin, which is now sitting in government-controlled wallets.

Which says a lot about where crypto is heading.

Many people still see crypto as this mysterious, untouchable space, where money could move freely, quietly, and sometimes illegally.

This case changes that narrative, because the US didn’t hack Chen’s systems or infiltrate a secret network – they simply followed the blockchain.

It means the system is doing what it was built to do: creating an open, verifiable record of value that can’t be erased or hidden forever.

The bad actors get caught; the real builders get stronger.