Living in a large neo-gothic house in the affluent city of Frisco, Texas, Feng Chen, his wife Tianqiong Xu and their two children appeared to be a normal, if wealthy, family. The FBI, however, has alleged that they are behind a $10 million online “pig butchering” scam, according to search warrants and an indictment reviewed by Forbes. In January this year, they left Texas and returned to China, where they are citizens, the documents say.
Chen and Xu are facing wire fraud charges for allegedly creating a number of rogue cryptocurrency investment platforms, which were then used to scam victims. The FBI has accused the pair of working with unnamed co-conspirators to trick people to invest their crypto through the fake exchanges, which would then show their money growing, convincing them to invest more. But the apps were fraudulent; and after milking all they could, the accused would allegedly run off with their victims’ money — what’s known as a pig butchering scam.
The FBI said it had so far identified “approximately 120 victims with losses of approximately $9,547,180 associated with this scheme,” according to a search warrant for the suspects’ cryptocurrency wallets. Individual victims were losing between $100,000 and over $800,000 each to the fraudsters, the court documents show.
In 2022, Chen and Xu bought a house in Frisco valued by Zillow at $1.5 million; they own another property in Allen, Texas, and drove in a $100,000 Porsche Cayenne, the FBI said.
The FBI had been chasing the couple since 2021 and had acquired access to their Google and Binance accounts as they prepared to file the charges in June, the documents show. But the family managed to leave the country earlier this year and have not returned. In January, Chen, Xu and their two children received new Chinese passports from the Chinese Consulate in Houston, Texas, bought tickets to go to China and departed three days later, the court documents show. They later liquidated their assets in the U.S., according to the government narrative.
Forbes emailed the listed Gmail address for Chen, but had not received a response at the time of publication. The defendants have no listed lawyers and remain fugitives. The Department of Justice declined to comment.
The FBI recently reported that pig butchering scams have grown dramatically, with crypto-investment fraud losses rising to $3.94 billion in 2023, up 53% on the previous year.
Investigators believe Chen built the platforms and their associated mobile apps. Data obtained from Google for an account the FBI identified as Chen’s showed searches related to crypto app development. According to the FBI, one of the app download pages accurately mimicked Apple’s App Store; the documents cite this as being responsible for hoodwinking one victim, who claimed to have been defrauded of over $830,000 in cryptocurrency.
Chen, emigrated to the U.S. in 2011 to study at the University of Wyoming, where he’d “processed seismic data by writing computer scripts in the python programming language and then designed a more efficient algorithm in the C programming language,” per the court filings. During the investigation he was also employed as a software engineer at Justice Benefits Inc., which helps local government agencies with budgeting. The company hadn’t responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
