For most of the last decade, the FBI made headlines for the wrong reasons. Surveillance warrants built on opposition research. Agents treating parents at school board meetings as a domestic threat category. Raids and leaks and investigations whose targets always seemed to share a party registration. Americans came away with a fair question: whom, exactly, is this agency protecting?
Operation Blackout is an answer, and it’s the right one.
Kash Patel released the numbers on Tuesday. More than $15 billion in assets and cryptocurrency seized. More than 500 fake investment websites shut down. Hundreds of arrests, thousands of trafficked workers freed, and more than 20 countries now working alongside the Bureau. The FBI also says it reached more than 10,000 Americans before they wired their savings to a con artist, stopping over half a billion dollars from leaving the country.
WATCH:
OPERATION BLACKOUT.
These aren’t random scammers sitting behind laptops. They built fortified compounds, trafficked human beings, forced slave labor, and constructed an international fraud machine targeting Americans.
So we’re dismantling the machine.
$15+ BILLION in assets… pic.twitter.com/5y1sqCKE1B
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) September 21, 2026
Understand who’s on the receiving end of these scams. It’s the retired widower who gets a friendly text from a wrong number that turns into a months-long relationship and a “can’t-miss” crypto platform. It’s the nurse who thinks she’s found an investment app her new online friend swears by. When federal investigators contacted nearly nine thousand victims through a companion effort, Operation Level Up, more than three-quarters of them had no idea they were being robbed. These aren’t gullible people. They’re targets of an industrial operation that has been refining its scripts for years.
And it is industrial. The texts on your phone aren’t coming from a teenager in a basement. They’re coming from fortified compounds in Southeast Asia, ringed with barbed wire and armed guards, where trafficked workers are forced to run the phones and the fake websites under threat of violence. The victims are on both ends. That’s the part the rest of the press has largely ignored: this is one of the largest human-trafficking and fraud enterprises on earth, and it’s aimed squarely at Americans.
The centerpiece of the seizure is the Prince Group case out of Brooklyn, in which prosecutors moved to forfeit roughly 127,000 bitcoin, the largest forfeiture action in Justice Department history. The group’s chairman, Chen Zhi, is charged with running forced-labor scam compounds in Cambodia. He’s still at large, and he’s entitled to his day in court. But the bitcoin is already in federal custody, and the operation that built it is under siege.
The significance here isn’t just the dollar figure. It’s the strategy. For years, the Bureau chased these scams one complaint at a time, and the compounds simply replaced whatever it disrupted. Blackout goes after the machine: the money, the domains, the infrastructure, the foreign partners who can actually reach inside the compounds.
Conservatives have spent years demanding an FBI that goes after criminals instead of citizens, that treats predators preying on the elderly as a higher priority than political enemies. Here it is. Give the Bureau credit, keep the pressure on, and demand that the rest of the Justice Department follow the same compass.
This is the job. It’s good to see it being done.
