WASHINGTON — DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro told The Post Thursday that $700 million seized from a Chinese-led cryptocurrency investment scam will be returned to American victims — many of them elderly — who had their life savings stolen.
Two Chinese nationals, Huang Xingshan and Jiang Wen Jie, operated a massive “scam compound” in Burma that trafficked others into forced labor for a scheme to defraud senior citizens and others in the US out of hundreds of millions of dollars, Pirro revealed at a news conference.
Asked about the $700 million taken from Americans, the former Fox News host and analyst admitted that returning the frozen crypto dollars would be “a long and rigorous process.”
“It can’t go further into a blockchain where we lose it,” she noted. “It’s just a question of time in terms of actually accessing it and getting it to victims.”
The scammers’ underlings were enslaved, tortured, beaten, and even policed at gunpoint while being forced to set up sham websites and mobile phone apps to deceive victims into making investments.
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The FBI later recovered more than 1,300 desktop computers and thousands of mobile phones used at the Shunda Compound in Burma, where Huang oversaw scams specifically targeting US victims.
Huang and Jiang decamped to Cambodia following the seizures, where other scam compounds have now been busted for impersonating US banks and the NYPD to steal Americans’ money, according to law enforcement officials.
When the pair tried to return to Burma in early 2026, Thai authorities arrested them on unrelated immigration charges.
Pirro and officials also announced Thursday that US authorities seized a Telegram channel used to recruit thousands of workers into one of the forced labor scam compounds in Cambodia.
Those compounds have threatened workers — who were lured under the false promise of landing high-paying gigs — with electrocution or even murder, according to the DOJ.
Additionally, officials said they had seized least 503 websites deployed for the cryptocurrency fraud schemes used to pilfer Americans’ dollars through phony investments.
“These criminals exploited trust and manipulated some of our most vulnerable population, the elderly, on a massive scale,” added FBI co-deputy director Christopher Raia.
Pirro noted that the “Chinese bosses” running the coordinated effort are currently detained in Thailand on immigration charges and she expected to soon prosecute them on US soil for alleged wire fraud.
The charges were announced as part of an interagency effort targeting fraudsters that included remarks from officials at the Department of Justice, FBI, Treasury and State Departments.
Pirro launched a Scam Center Strike Force in November 2025 and said Thursday that the effort was working as “a new theater of war against Chinese transnational organized crime,” at the president’s direction.
Raia added that in 2025 alone, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded more than one million fraud complaints, totaling more than $20 billion in losses for Americans.
Of that, more than $7.2 billion came from cryptocurrency fraud schemes.
