I'm not sure if one can merely walk away from a criminal enterprise of that size. As soon as you stop paying certain people you end up in a cage, and unless the stream of money is constant there is no reason to just not reneg on all prior agreements and go in a cage for stuff you already paid authorities off for.

> As soon as you stop paying certain people you end up in a cage

You end up dead because your co-conspirators don't want to end up in a cage.

So the whole crypto anonymity thing isn’t actually real? As it turns out, tracing people is still easier than tracing money? Decentralized economies are run by criminal enterprises?! We aren’t safe!?!

Wonder how this whole concept overlays onto LLMs, with a lot more money on the line and a lot less regulation.

You're probably joking, but even if crypto was totally anonymous, running a massive criminal human trafficking empire in the real world is very non-anonymous.

Good old police work still works. Because people need to talk to each other to do stuff. The only time anonymity helps is if you can pull it all off solo, and mix the funds enough to not be traced as well as cover tracks well enough.

Crypto anonymity is still possible if you don't plan to spend your ill-gotten millions or billions particularly quickly. But, of course, you don't get to having a massive active criminal empire that way.

At that scale, you have massive influence within the Cambodian government, so you're not worried about "getting caught" in the traditional sense.

You still have to worry about falling out with the government or then caving to foreign pressure and selling you off to appease a foreign power.

These scams have enormous scale. The Economist has a fascinating podcast about it. The full series requires a subscription, but it is worth at least listening to the first 3 free episodes. https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc

> Did they think the scam was going to go on forever?

You underestimate the intensity of human greed.

Had they thought $1B was enough they would have missed out on $14B.

I think the implication is they could have stayed under the radar and still have that $1B.

Chances are they still have a lot of the money scammed, just not those particular 15B.

In a way it's like with an overfunded startup: when at some point in time the music stops because even the last would-be investor realized that the business will never be profitable, the company collapses. But all those paychecks received for playing with Other People's Money don't magically return.

They have shareholders who bought the shares for more than the company annual revenue and expect infinite potential of profits to justify the price they paid