New York Duo Charged With Laundering $43 Million From 'Pig Butchering' Investment Scams

Key points

• U.S. Prosecutors charged Zhuoying Chen, 27, and Haojie Zhang, 38, on Thursday with laundering at least $43 million from online investment scams.
• The pair allegedly managed a network of more than a dozen people across Queens and Brooklyn between 2020 and 2022.
• About 45 shell companies and roughly 140 bank accounts were used to move stolen cash to China, according to the unsealed indictment.
• Each defendant faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
• The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report puts investment fraud losses at $8.6 billion last year, up from $6.5 billion the year before.

The Justice Department has charged two New York residents with running a laundering operation that funneled tens of millions of dollars stolen from Americans in online investment scams.

Chen and Zhang allegedly managed more than a dozen money movers across Queens and Brooklyn between 2020 and 2022. According to the unsealed indictment, they pushed at least $43 million through the banking system on behalf of overseas scammers, using about 45 shell companies, businesses that exist only on paper to disguise who really controls the money, and roughly 140 bank accounts.

The mechanics weren't glamorous. Set up companies that don't really exist. Open bank accounts in those companies' names. Receive victim wire transfers. Get the money to China before anyone notices.

How did the scams that fed this network actually work?

They're the slow, patient kind, often called "pig butchering" because criminals build up a victim's trust before they take everything.

It typically starts on social media or a messaging app. A stranger strikes up a friendly conversation, sometimes flirtatious, sometimes just chatty. Over weeks they mention an investment platform showing good returns, usually crypto. The victim is walked through opening an account on a polished-looking site, and early "profits" appear on the dashboard. That dashboard is fake. Every figure is controlled by the scammers.

Encouraged by the numbers, victims send more. When they try to withdraw, they're told to pay "taxes" or "fees" first. Then the site goes dark.

Chen and Zhang's alleged job was to catch those incoming wire transfers in U.S. Shell-company accounts and get them overseas quickly. We covered the infrastructure that makes this possible at scale when we reported on 236,000 fake-exchange sites built on a single Chinese dev framework in June.

"For nearly two years, these two Chinese nationals allegedly ran a sophisticated, illicit network that laundered funds stolen from unsuspecting victims' life savings," said John A. Condon, Executive Associate Director of Homeland Security Investigations.

Should ordinary people be worried?

Yes, and the scale of the problem justifies it. Investment fraud accounted for 49% of all scam complaints tracked by the FBI last year, with losses reaching $8.6 billion, compared with $6.5 billion the previous year.

This case isn't an outlier. Daren Li, 42, was sentenced in February to 20 years in absentia for his role in a $73 million crypto investment scheme. The Justice Department charged four more defendants in December over a separate pig-butchering operation responsible for losses exceeding $80 million. We've tracked the wider laundering ecosystem too: our earlier story on the DOJ's action against the Prince Group network covered how $15 billion in seized assets prompted the creation of a dedicated Scam Center Strike Force. European authorities have separately dismantled two investment fraud rings this year, with combined victim losses above €150 million.

A few plain rules hold. Any stranger coaching you on crypto after sliding into your messages is not acting in your interest. A platform that shows profits but demands new fees before letting you withdraw has already taken the money. Chen and Zhang each face up to 20 years if convicted. Their victims, in most of these cases, won't see a refund.