The mystery of how the US collected $15 billion in Bitcoin from Tran Chi

LuBian was once one of the largest Bitcoin mining companies. Photo: Elliptic .

In August 2025, blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence announced the suspected theft of 127,426 BTC (worth $3.5 billion at the time) in December 2020. The victim was LuBian, a Bitcoin mining company with one of the largest mining pools in the world .

With operations in China and Iran, LuBian once controlled nearly 6% of the global Bitcoin mining market. Neither LuBian nor the hackers publicly acknowledged the attack. Arkham was the first to discover and publicize the incident.

The theft targeted a weakness in the algorithm LuBian used to generate encryption keys, which was vulnerable to brute-force attacks. A few days later, LuBian used more than $40,000 to send hundreds of transactions to the hacker’s wallet, with an embedded message: “Please return the money to us, we will pay the reward.”

The “stolen” Bitcoins remain dormant until June 2024, when they are transferred to a new wallet, and then remain dormant.

On October 14, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced an indictment charging Chen Zhi, chairman of Prince Group, with wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy in connection with online scams carried out by the group.

The indictment describes how Prince Group laundered money from online scams through a network of legitimate businesses, including cryptocurrency mining operations, generating large amounts of clean BTC that had no connection to criminal proceeds. One of these mining businesses was LuBian.

LuBian's stolen cryptocurrency. Photo: Elliptic.

Along with the indictment, the US Department of Justice announced the largest forfeiture action in history, seizing approximately 127,271 BTC owned by Zhi.

The indictment alleges that the BTC were stolen from LuBian in 2021. The indictment lists 25 BTC wallet addresses, which indicate that the seized BTC were previously held. These addresses are the LuBian addresses (controlled by Chen) from which the Bitcoin was stolen.

The DOJ claims to be in control of the seized BTC. With a current value of $15 billion , this is the largest seizure ever by the US government . This suggests that the BTC movements in June and July 2024 may be a transfer of assets to wallets controlled by the US government.

It is not yet clear how these Bitcoins were stored in the US. It is also not clear who “stole” the BTC from Chen/LuBian, or whether the theft actually occurred. If so, it is likely that an opportunistic hacker took the opportunity to steal LuBian’s BTC before the US government discovered it.

Source: https://znews.vn/bi-an-cach-my-thu-15-ty-usd-bitcoin-tu-tran-chi-post1594741.html