On Chen Zhi's super yacht, parties almost take place every night. Professional DJs play music, Cuban cigars and long-standing Macallan whiskey are served unlimitedly.
Those lavish parties are just part of Chen Zhi's way of building a dense influence network to the point of seemingly inviolable.
The relationship carefully woven by Chen Zhi has protected this fraud boss for many years.
Bloomberg has exchanged with more than 20 people who understand Chen Zhi's empire, reviewed court records, public documents and found that the ability to systematically expand assets and influence has helped this fraudster operate almost without hindrance for more than a decade.
This is considered one of the largest and most serious transnational organized crime organizations in modern history," said Leo Lin, former leader in the Taiwan (China) police agency, currently a security lecturer at Charles Sturt University, Australia.
This week, Chen Zhi's lawyer filed a lawsuit with a federal court in New York, USA, requesting to reject the US government's decision to confiscate a large amount of Bitcoin related to Chen Zhi. The lawyer questioned the timing of the seizure of cryptocurrencies and argued that these Bitcoins could not be money collected from fraud or money laundering.
According to FBI investigations, a close aide to Chen Zhi once boasted that in 2018, Prince Corporation earned more than 30 million USD/day from "swine killing" scams and related illegal activities. Part of this money was used to finance cryptocurrency farms, produce Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that can be easily transferred across borders.
According to the US indictment, Chen Zhi closely monitored the operations of the scam dens. When an individual was considered troublemaker, the boss could approve the beatings, but requested not to beat them to death. "We must monitor and not let them escape" - Chen Zhi ordered.
In another case, Chen Zhi directed the search for an employee accused of embezzling money: "Collect all information before deciding what to do. Find out where that person is".
According to Erin West, former prosecutor of California, USA, Chen Zhi "can exist between 2 worlds: legal business and illegal activities" for a long time. He believes that the decisive factor is Chen Zhi's huge financial scale. "It is very difficult for anyone to resist cooperating with him, because the opportunity to access that huge fortune is too attractive," he said.
Agencies such as the British Foreign Office and a unit of the US Treasury Department - the Global Target Office - have continuously monitored Chen Zhi for many years. However, Western officials are said to have considered the appropriate time to act. Britain is concerned that if the evidence is not strong enough, Chen Zhi could win the lawsuit and overturn sanctions against himself and Prince Corporation.
Although Chen Zhi's extradition from Cambodia to China caused major disruption to this fraud organization, expert Erin West believes that the Prince empire has not ended. "He is a genius in building and sheltering this system. I think it will take many years for governments to untangle everything he has done," he said.
