The Department of Justice is going after the leader of one of the groups sending scam emails and text messages. <\/p>\n
Investigators accused Chen “Vicent” Zhi of leading a sophisticated crime network based in Cambodia. <\/p>\n
They say he runs a company called The Prince Group that’s operating 10 scam compounds, which is a building where people inside are often held against their will and forced to contact potential victims to try and scam them out of money.<\/p>\n
Federal officials have already seized $15B in Bitcoin from Zhi.<\/p>\n
Former Santa Clara County Prosecutor Erin West went to Cambodia to investigate these scammers, spoke with people connected to the “Scamming Compounds” and also started a nonprofit called Operation Shamrock, working to shed light on this type of organized crime. <\/p>\n
West spoke with NBC Bay Area’s Raj Mathai about this situation and tracking overseas scams. Watch the full interview in the video player above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Department of Justice is going after the leader of one of the groups sending scam emails and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[88,90,89,198],"class_list":{"0":"post-7296","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-jose","8":"tag-san-jose","9":"tag-san-jose-headlines","10":"tag-san-jose-news","11":"tag-santa-clara-county"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}