A Chinese national who helped steal $27 million from roughly 2,000 elderly Americans—and was famously exposed in a viral YouTube sting—has been sentenced to more than six years in federal prison.
Los Angeles resident Jiandong Chen, known by the nickname “Little Tiger,” pleaded guilty in April to participating in the money-laundering operation alongside several accomplices.
According to the US Attorney’s Office, the five-person scheme operated from 2021 through 2023. The group posed as bank representatives, government officials and technical-support workers, while also using fake refund offers to target older Americans, many of them in their 70s and 80s.
Victims were contacted through emails, phone calls and computer pop-ups that instructed them to dial numbers connected to a fraudulent call center in India.
Scammers then persuaded the victims to transfer money to members of the criminal network, who were located mainly across Southern California and Nevada. Payments arrived through mailed packages and wire transfers, while some criminals collected cash in person from the victims’ homes.
In July 2023, scam investigators from the YouTube channel Trilogy Media arranged an elaborate sting to catch Chen. Video from the operation shows the scammer arriving to collect cash from a location he believed belonged to an elderly victim before being confronted by the creators.
“This is illegal. Illegal,” YouTuber Ashton Bingham told him. “You know that?”
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Chen claimed he could not fully understand the confrontation because of a language barrier before getting into a vehicle with an accomplice.
Bingham and fellow fraud investigator Art Kulik attended Chen’s sentencing, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said Chen entered the United States in November 2022 and joined the operation in February 2023. A number of videos showed him collecting packages from victims and counting the cash inside.
Although police arrested him in June 2023, authorities said Chen continued gathering money for the scheme later that year.
As part of his guilty plea, Chen acknowledged stealing $9.5 million from victims. He also admitted using counterfeit identification documents and repeatedly changing locations to evade law enforcement.
“These victims weren’t foolish. They were lied to and exploited by a sophisticated criminal network,” US Attorney Adam Gordon said in a statement. “Stopping fraud takes an online village. We’ll keep prosecuting aggressively, but with friends to our cause like Ash and Art, we can do even more.”
US District Judge Robert S. Huie sharply criticized Chen at sentencing for preying on vulnerable victims.
The judge said the losses involved “more than just money,” adding that the scammers also took “people’s self-respect, their dignity, trust with their family members.”
