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Tokyo police arrested Hu Xiaowei, a 44-year-old Cypriot national of Chinese descent, on June 22 for allegedly submitting false residency documents in Tokyo’s Chuo Ward. The charge itself, a fraudulent move-in notification, sounds almost quaint. The backstory is anything but.
Hu is a senior figure tied to the Prince Group, an organization accused of running one of the most sprawling crypto fraud operations in history. US authorities seized approximately 127,271 Bitcoin, valued at around $15 billion at the time, in October 2025 in connection with the group’s activities. That seizure ranks among the largest financial forfeitures the Department of Justice has ever executed.
A residency filing hides a much bigger story
The immediate arrest charges center on Hu allegedly falsifying a move-in notification to support an application for permanent residency in Japan. Two associates were detained alongside him on the same charges.
Hu, who also goes by aliases including Chen Xiao’er and Wu An Ming, has been sanctioned by both the US and UK governments for his ties to the Prince Group. Properties and entities linked to him span multiple jurisdictions, with UK authorities alone freezing assets worth over $44 million connected to his name.
The Prince Group’s pig butchering empire
The Prince Group, led by chairman Chen Zhi, stands accused of operating transnational fraud at an almost industrial scale. The organization allegedly ran forced-labor scam compounds in Cambodia, where victims were trafficked and coerced into executing so-called “pig butchering” schemes against unsuspecting investors worldwide.
Pig butchering is a type of long-con investment fraud where scammers build trust with victims over weeks or months, usually through messaging apps or fake dating profiles, before luring them into fraudulent crypto investment platforms.
The 127,271 Bitcoin seized by US authorities in October 2025 gives a sense of the scale involved. Chen Zhi, the group’s chairman, was indicted by US authorities in October 2025. He was subsequently extradited to China in January 2026, where he currently faces legal proceedings.
The forced-labor dimension adds another layer of severity. Trafficking victims into scam compounds to perpetrate fraud against other victims has drawn attention from law enforcement agencies and human rights organizations globally.
What this means for crypto markets and investors
For retail investors, the pig butchering epidemic is a more immediate concern. These scams have become the dominant form of crypto fraud globally, surpassing ransomware and exchange hacks in total dollar losses.
The international coordination on display here, with the US, UK, China, and Japan all acting against the same network, signals a shift in the enforcement landscape. Hu Xiaowei was sanctioned in the US and UK, had assets frozen in Britain, and got arrested in Japan.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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