Beijing Tech Heist: Feng’s Team Swipes $20M in Brazen Fake Bonus Scheme

Another day, another 'creative' corporate payroll exploit—this time with a $20 million price tag.

How they pulled it off

Feng's crew allegedly bypassed internal controls by fabricating bonus payments, proving once again that the juiciest hacks still require good old-fashioned human ingenuity. The Beijing-based tech firm now joins the growing list of companies learning the hard way: your accounting department is your weakest security link.

Finance world shrugs

Meanwhile in traditional banking circles, executives quietly nod in appreciation—$20 million would barely cover a decent yacht, but for tech sector thieves, it's apparently life-changing money.

The gang used coin mixers to hide the Bitcoin trail

After moving the money into shell accounts, Feng gave new instructions, this time to MOVE the money into crypto. They used eight different international platforms to split the funds into batches of Bitcoin, hiding the movement across borders.

Then they used a method called coin mixing, which scrambles the trail of crypto transactions to make them untraceable. The goal was to make it impossible to figure out where the money came from, or where it was going.

By the time the funds were converted back into yuan, they had passed through multiple accounts and platforms. Some of that laundered money ended up back in company accounts secretly controlled by Feng, Tang, and Yang. Investigators later called it a “closed loop” money laundering chain, fueled by tech and hidden behind fake businesses and fake documents.

Prosecutor Li Tao, who works in the Science and Technology Crime division in Haidian, built an evidence system by comparing data, transaction records, and cash flow. That exposed every step of the fraud, from policy manipulation to the crypto transfers.

“We recovered over 90 Bitcoin during the investigation,” Li said. That recovery only covered a portion of the stolen funds, but it confirmed the gang’s methods and the money trail they tried to erase.

The court gave Feng the longest sentence, 14 years and six months, while the rest of the group got between three and fourteen years, with fines. All were convicted of occupational embezzlement.

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