A Chinese national has been sentenced to nearly four years in U.S. federal prison for laundering tens of millions of dollars stolen from American investors through a large‑scale digital asset investment scam run from Southeast Asia.
On Tuesday, Chinese citizen Jingliang Su received a 46‑month prison sentence for his role in laundering more than $36.9 million in victim funds tied to an international cryptocurrency fraud scheme operated from scam centers in Cambodia.
The court also ordered Su to pay $26,867,242.44 in restitution to the victims. He pleaded guilty in June 2025 to one count of conspiracy to operate an illegal money-transmitting business.
According to the Justice Department, Su was part of a coordinated criminal network that used classic online social engineering combined with cryptocurrency infrastructure and offshore banking channels to defraud U.S. investors.
Court documents show that the fraud operation relied on aggressive outreach and trust‑building through unsolicited social media messages, phone calls, text messages, and online dating platforms.
Once contact was established, overseas co‑conspirators spent time grooming victims and then promoted fraudulent digital asset “investment opportunities.”
To make the scam appear legitimate, the network built fake cryptocurrency trading websites that closely mimicked real exchanges.
Victims were instructed to send funds to these platforms, where they could seemingly view their “accounts” and watch their supposed investments grow.
In reality, the money had already been stolen. The scammers manipulated on‑screen balances to show that investments were appreciating, while behind the scenes they were routing funds through a complex laundering chain spanning multiple jurisdictions and asset types.
Millions Stolen from U.S. Investors
Victim funds were initially funneled into U.S. bank accounts controlled by co‑conspirators, often held in the names of shell companies. From there, more than $36.9 million was consolidated into a single account at Deltec Bank in the Bahamas.
Su and his co‑conspirators then instructed Deltec Bank to convert the fiat funds into Tether (USDT), a widely used U.S. dollar‑pegged stablecoin, and transfer the USDT to a digital asset wallet controlled in Cambodia.
That wallet served as a key distribution hub: co‑conspirators in Cambodia moved the USDT onwards to leaders of scam centers across the region, further obscuring the money trail.
Investigators ultimately identified 174 U.S. victims who collectively lost tens of millions of dollars in the scheme.
The case highlights how traditional fraud tactics relationship scams, investment pitches, and fake platforms are being combined with cryptocurrency, cross‑border banking, and unlicensed money transmitting networks to scale operations and complicate tracing efforts.
So far, eight co‑conspirators have pleaded guilty, including Jose Somarriba and ShengSheng He, who admitted to conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business and received 51‑month and 36‑month prison sentences, respectively.
The investigation was led by the U.S. Secret Service’s Global Investigative Operations Center, with support from Homeland Security Investigations’ El Camino Real Financial Crimes Task Force, Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center, the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, Dominican National Police, and the U.S. Marshals Service.
Prosecution was handled by trial attorneys from the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS), the Fraud Section, and Assistant U.S. Attorneys from the Central District of California.
The sentencing is part of a broader DOJ push to disrupt scam center operations worldwide, targeting not just front‑line scammers but also money launderers, infrastructure operators, and cross‑border facilitators.
CCIPS reports that since 2020 it has secured over 180 cybercrime convictions and court orders returning more than $350 million to victims, underscoring an increasingly aggressive stance against crypto‑enabled fraud and global online investment scams.
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