Odaily Planet Daily reports that Zhou Hongyi, founder of 360 Group, stated in his personal social media that the Bitcoin transfer involved in the Prince Group Chen Zhi case occurred in 2020, during Trump’s first term. After Biden took office in 2021, the U.S. discovered that these coins had unclear origins and did not immediately seize them publicly. Instead, they kept the assets in a long-term, technically controlled dormant state. It wasn’t until 2025, when Trump was re-elected, that the U.S. government publicly announced the confiscation of these assets. Strangely, according to the legal documents prosecuting Chen Zhi, the U.S. did not have any American citizens victimized by telecom scams before stealing these digital assets. It’s like shooting an arrow and then finding the target. More specifically, the U.S. has formed a perfect closed loop of “attack, harvest, and evidence collection.”
Even more ironic, after the U.S. Department of Justice announced the indictment on October 8, 2025, several so-called victim claim groups emerged within the U.S. However, in-depth analysis revealed that these claimants were scam victims from May 2020 to August 2022, and their timelines and asset flows did not match these Bitcoins at all. In other words, these Bitcoins were stolen by hackers as early as December 2020 and had nothing to do with the so-called victims inside the U.S. The so-called victims are merely used as a backdrop to justify “legal confiscation” and to build a narrative with witnesses. The indictment itself is riddled with flaws, a typical patchwork of evidence. For example, the “mobile wall” image in the indictment was actually from March 2023, when CCTV’s 315 Gala exposed criminal tools used by online water army gangs. The chairs in the picture are common domestic items. Such a basic mistake of misidentification not only exposes the roughness of evidence collection but also reveals that the crackdown on crime is being used as a pretext to conceal the true intent of asset plunder.
Therefore, the most frightening aspect of state-level attacks is not a one-time breach but long-term infiltration and control. Once the rules and law enforcement conditions are in place, the entire operation can be executed seamlessly. People might think they are fighting crime, but in many cases, they are actually turning others’ assets into their own “strategic reserves.”
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