Telecom fraud is a household name in China, and countless Chinese people have suffered because of it. Some victims have been swindled out of every last penny; some have been buried in debt; some have even seen their families torn apart. Nearly every Chinese person with a mobile phone has received a fraudulent text message or phone call, and the number of victims is beyond counting.
According to statistics from the China Association of the Elderly, 60 percent of elderly people in China have fallen victim to telecom fraud, with an average loss of 87,000 yuan per person. In addition, many young people have been lured or trafficked into fraud compounds in Southeast Asian countries such as Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia, where they are beaten, tortured, and even have their organs removed, living out a wretched, terrifying existence with no light at the end of the tunnel.
So who exactly is the chief culprit behind telecom fraud, a scourge that has done such serious harm to the Chinese people?
From the recent widespread exposure of Chen Zhi, boss of the Prince Group, we can see that the CCP is itself the originator and mastermind behind telecom fraud.
In October 2025, Chen Zhi, boss of the Prince Group, was placed under international wanted notice for killing a South Korean national. His bitcoin holdings, worth $15 billion (about 107 billion yuan), were seized by the United States, along with 19 properties he owned in the United Kingdom. Singapore subsequently seized another 800 million yuan worth of Chen's assets. The U.S. Department of Justice has filed legal proceedings against Chen.
Chen Zhi was born in 1987 into an ordinary fishing family in Lianjiang County, Fujian Province, without much financial means. Around the year 2000, Chen dropped out of school before finishing middle school and found work as a network administrator at an internet cafe. He earned his first pot of gold through gray-market operations such as running online games and outsourcing cyberattacks.
In 2010, Chen Zhi arrived in Cambodia. In 2011, he bought a plot of land cheaply on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, and after building on it, used contacts back in China to lure large numbers of young people to Cambodia through "fake job postings," kidnapping, and other means, forcing them to carry out "pig-butchering" scams and similar fraud schemes. (Pig-butchering is a common term for a type of telecom and internet fraud, in which scammers pose as online romantic partners, build an emotional relationship to gain the victim's trust, and then lure them into fake investments or gambling.)
In 2015, Chen Zhi founded the "Prince Group," setting up more than ten fraud compounds and launching internet fraud on a massive scale. The management and staff of Chen's fraud syndicate were almost entirely mainland Chinese, and the vast majority of its victims were mainland Chinese citizens as well. In just over ten years, built on the foundation of fraud, the Prince Group grew into a multinational conglomerate operating in real estate, finance, healthcare, and other businesses across more than 30 countries, with assets reaching into the hundreds of billions of yuan. In reality, the Prince Group operates under the guise of real estate, finance, and philanthropy, while actually functioning as a criminal syndicate encompassing kidnapping, fraud, human trafficking, live organ harvesting, murder, and numerous other crimes.
Without the backing of an extremely powerful force behind the scenes, it is hard to imagine how someone from the very bottom of society, who never even finished middle school, could amass hundreds of billions in assets within just a few short years. How could a young man with nothing to his name, who spent his days in internet cafes, manage to forge connections across the political, business, and criminal underworlds in a foreign land within just ten years? The identity of the power behind Chen Zhi and his Prince Group is, in fact, already plain for all to see.
Chen Zhi, the head of a transnational criminal syndicate, was astonishingly awarded China's "Corporate Social Responsibility Model Award" two years running, in 2021 and 2022. In addition, Chen received numerous other honors, such as "Entrepreneur of the Year," "Visionary Leadership Award," "Philanthropist," "Global Brand Award," "Chinese Business Legend," and more. These were all honors that media outlets and organizations under CCP rule competed to bestow upon the Prince Group.
China's ambassador to Cambodia, Wang Wenbin, was photographed in a friendly pose with Chen Zhi and presented him with a certificate of honor.
In October 2019, a three-person delegation led by Lan Guilan, chairwoman of the Fuzhou Overseas Chinese Federation, visited the Prince Group to promote investment and goodwill exchanges; also in October 2019, Zhao Jinling of the Beijing Red Cross Foundation led a delegation to visit the Prince Group in Cambodia; and in August 2025, Wang Hongjin, director of the Shanxi Provincial Department of Commerce, personally visited the Prince Group's "Happiness Project" site in Phnom Penh to conduct research and provide guidance.
The Prince Group's headquarters building in Cambodia was constructed by China Construction Fourth Engineering Division, topped out in 2018. China Construction Fourth Engineering Division was also involved in the construction of multiple other Prince Group projects.
The Prince Group and Huawei maintain a strategic partnership, having signed a memorandum of strategic cooperation.
The Prince Group also established a headquarters in Beijing, located on Chaoyangmenwai Street in Chaoyang District.
Chen Zhi engaged in rampant money laundering in Hong Kong for as long as nine years.
CCP state media also sang the praises of the Prince Group, lending Chen Zhi its platform. China Daily's website published an article on February 28, 2019, titled "Prince Real Estate Group Becomes a Benchmark Among Cambodia's Renowned Real Estate Firms." On May 16, 2025, China.com ran a report on Chen Zhi titled "Prince Group Holding Chairman Chen Zhi Wins 'Visionary Philanthropist of the Year' Award."
By contrast, when the Global Anti-Scam Alliance's Asia Summit was held in Singapore in September 2025, the CCP did not attend, let alone report on it.
After Chen Zhi and the Prince Group were criminally charged by the U.S. Department of Justice, triggering a firestorm of public opinion at home, many independent content creators exposed and criticized Chen Zhi on platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Weibo. But China's internet regulators deleted posts, throttled traffic, and banned comments, going to great lengths to suppress the public's access to the truth about Chen Zhi and the Prince Group's fraud.
After the United States, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Taiwan, and other countries and regions took action to seize the assets of Chen Zhi and the Prince Group, the CCP took no action whatsoever against the Prince Group's funds, real estate, and other assets within mainland China.
All of this fully demonstrates that the CCP itself is the mastermind behind Chen Zhi and the Prince Group. Put plainly, Chen Zhi is nothing more than a front man laundering business for CCP power-holders. In fact, the crimes involved in so-called "telecom fraud syndicates" go far beyond swindling money -- these are criminal organizations that combine kidnapping and extortion, unlawful imprisonment, human trafficking, organ trading, rape and sexual assault, forced prostitution, drug manufacturing and trafficking, murder, arms dealing, and numerous other serious crimes. Yet in the CCP's official propaganda, it deliberately downplays all this by calling it merely "telecom fraud," misleading people into thinking it is nothing more than swindling money -- which is, in effect, a disguised form of whitewashing.
On the one hand, the CCP makes a great show of publicizing its anti-fraud efforts -- developing anti-fraud apps, hanging anti-fraud banners and slogans everywhere, setting up anti-fraud centers across the country, and sending anti-fraud text messages to the public, giving the impression that it is earnestly fighting fraud. In reality, the CCP has always said one thing while doing another -- the thief crying "stop, thief." Had the United States and South Korea not moved against Chen Zhi this time, there is no telling how much longer the Prince Group would have continued its evildoing, or how many more Chinese people would have been defrauded and harmed.
Coincidentally, not long after the Prince Group's dark secrets were exposed, news emerged that 11,500 China Mobile SIM cards had been discovered at the Daluo border crossing between Yunnan Province and Myanmar. As everyone knows, mobile phone cards in mainland China operate under a real-name registration system: the person registering must appear in person, present their own ID card, undergo facial recognition, and sign a pledge not to use the card for fraud -- a complicated process. So how did these more than 10,000 SIM cards get past real-name verification? If this single seizure turned up over 10,000 cards, how many SIM cards have been sold to fraud compounds over the years without anyone knowing?
When the CCP rolled out the real-name registration system for phone cards, its stated reason was that it would prevent telecom fraud. But what ordinary people never expected was that, after real-name registration was implemented, telecom fraud not only failed to be curbed but grew even more rampant -- and fraudsters gained detailed access to people's personal information, allowing them to carry out fraud with pinpoint precision. In other words, the CCP's real-name system has instead become an accomplice to telecom fraud. The CCP's real-name registration policy was never implemented for the sake of ordinary people at all -- it was implemented to monitor, exploit, and harm the people.
While the CCP harms its own citizens with one hand, with the other it uses its propaganda machinery to boast that "China is the safest country in the world with the best public order," or that "you have a powerful motherland standing behind you"... Now, more and more Chinese people are finally seeing through this deceptive propaganda. More and more people understand that, in the CCP's eyes, ordinary people are nothing more than beasts of burden to be enslaved at will, chives to be harvested at any time, and "human ore" to be killed and mined for organs whenever needed.
While the CCP commits evil acts that harm the people with one hand, with the other it uses propaganda and public opinion to package and beautify itself, so that ordinary people, even as they suffer greatly under it, are made to feel grateful and sing its praises. This has been the CCP's consistent pattern throughout the seventy years since it seized power. In the three-year Great Famine of the 1960s, forty million Chinese starved to death; during the ten-year Cultural Revolution, several million Chinese were persecuted to death -- yet the CCP indoctrinated the people with slogans like "not even one's own father and mother are as dear as Chairman Mao" and "the Party's kindness is greater than heaven and earth." The CCP's evil, cunning, and viciousness are truly unprecedented and unrepeatable. The CCP's deceptive propaganda has confused so many people that many Chinese citizens suffer greatly under it without even realizing it -- and instead defend and make excuses for the CCP.
Through this Prince Group affair, many ordinary Chinese people have come to see clearly the evil nature of the CCP -- the CCP itself is the demon that harms people, the true chief culprit behind the suffering of the Chinese people. One internet user commented, "The headquarters of the fraud syndicate is right there in Zhongnanhai"; another said, "How can you expect an organization that built itself on deception to actually fight fraud?"; and another said, "[The CCP] never does a single good deed, and never misses a single bad one."
There are many more fraud kingpins like Chen Zhi being nurtured by the CCP, and many fraud compounds across Southeast Asia continue to operate. The CCP's schemes for harming people are too numerous to count, and telecom fraud is merely one of its many methods of victimizing the population. If the Chinese people are to escape the CCP's harm, the only way forward is to dismantle the CCP entirely. So how can the CCP be peacefully dismantled? Recognizing the CCP's evil, withdrawing from its Party, Youth League, and Young Pioneers, and refusing to remain a part of it -- that, in itself, is dismantling it.