A Chinese Fentanyl Smuggling Network’s Footprints in Japan
This article is the result of a collaboration with Japanese publishing partner Nikkei. You can find Nikkei’s investigation here.
Earlier this year, a man and a woman stood trial in a New York courtroom on charges related to the illicit drugs trade. They had been arrested as part of an undercover sting by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after more than 200 kilograms of precursor chemicals used to make the synthetic opioid fentanyl were shipped from China to the US. It was enough to make 25 million deadly doses of the drug, authorities said.
The Chinese nationals were also accused of conspiring to import tonne-quantities of fentanyl precursors to the US, where tens of thousands of people die from opioid overdoses every year. After a two-week trial, a Manhattan jury found the pair guilty of conspiracy to import fentanyl precursors and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Qingzhou “Bruce” Wang, 36, and Yiyi “Chiron” Chen, 32, worked for Hubei Amarvel Biotech (AmarvelBio), a chemical firm based in the Chinese city of Wuhan. They were arrested in 2023 after being lured from China to Fiji as part of a DEA operation and subsequently extradited to the US. The case marked the first time US authorities prosecuted Chinese company executives for trafficking fentanyl precursors.
But court documents showed there may be links to another East Asian country. Bellingcat was contacted by the Japanese newspaper Nikkei, which was investigating AmarvelBio’s connection to Japan, suspecting the country was being used as a command post for the cross-border smuggling operation.
Nikkei was looking into Xia Fengzhi, a Chinese man referred to in the New York legal proceedings as “the boss in Japan”. It had found an individual by that name who was listed as the owner of a Chinese company selling raw chemical materials called Fushikai Trading Co Ltd, which according to Nikkei was active under the brand name “Firsky”. A website for Firsky China included a certificate for Fushikai Trading with the same identification code seen on Fushikai’s corporate records. The company, according to its website, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Firsky Co. Ltd., which was registered in Nagoya, an industrial city in central Japan.
Nikkei pulled the corporate records for Firsky in Japan, which showed Xia headed the company. Records obtained by Nikkei also showed that the Chinese company’s supervisor was listed as Qingzhou Wang, the same name as one of the two AmarvelBio executives convicted in the US.
Nikkei asked Bellingcat’s financial investigations team to leverage its expertise in open source research to independently verify the Japanese company’s connection to AmarvelBio. Our investigation uncovered evidence showing the two companies are not only part of the same international smuggling network – they are effectively one and the same. This is how we did it.
The Japan Connection
Linking AmarvelBio and Firsky through domain records was not possible because both websites were registered through a provider that uses privacy protection, which conceals personal details from the public. However, information obtained by US law enforcement can become public during court proceedings.
CourtListener’s Advanced RECAP Search is a free tool operated by the non-profit Free Law Project that allows users to search millions of federal court documents made available through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) service.
A CourtListener search for “amarvelbio.com” returned multiple results, including an exhibit from the federal case against AmarvelBio. This contained subpoenaed domain registration data, which showed that convicted AmarvelBio employee Yiyi “Chiron” Chen registered a number of domains, including for AmarvelBio, its “sister company” Wuhan Wingroup, and Firsky (in both China and Japan).
Another domain (firskytech.com) that was not included in the documents available on CourtListener was registered months after Chen’s 2023 arrest and remains online as of publication. This website lists an address in Wuhan and describes itself as a wholly Japanese-owned supplier of “high purity” chemical intermediates. While its registration details remain private, the contact email listed on the site uses the domain for Firsky China – “firsky-cn.com” – which was registered by Chen and is therefore linked to the network.
Bellingcat also found Chen’s personal gmail address in the source code in archives of three websites (here, here and here) that were in both the subpoenaed registration records and a list of 12 domains US authorities seized after linking them to AmarvelBio, further corroborating her involvement.
Additional domain links between AmarvelBio and the Japanese iteration of Firsky were identified in archived advertisements from the darknet marketplace Breaking Bad, which were found via leak aggregator intelx.io. The chemicals ads were posted under AmarvelBio’s rebranded name, AmarvelTech, following the Chinese company’s indictment in 2023.
Some of the ads led to whrchem.com – one of the 12 websites seized by the DEA. Domain records discovered via intelx.io revealed that whrchem.com was controlled by two email accounts, one of which used the domain for Firsky Japan – “firsky-jp.com”. The same email is also listed as an “author” on an archive of whrchem.com.
Bellingcat’s analysis of AmarvelBio and Firsky’s profiles, advertisements and salespeople uncovered further links between the two companies, including recycled phone numbers, photographs, watermarks, company bios and compliance certificates that could not be verified.
Searches for Firsky on the Breaking Bad forum returned an existing profile for a salesperson called “Cindy”, whose contact website was listed as bmkpmkbdo.com. A 2024 archive of the site displays Cindy’s WhatsApp number which, searches show, had previously been used in an AmarvelBio advertisement posted on Breaking Bad.
Firsky has a seller profile with more than 350 active listings on the e-commerce platform ChemicalBook. But in one ad, under descriptions of the company, Firsky is interchangeably described as AmarvelBio.
While many Firsky ads included stock images branded with its watermark, some products advertised by Firsky were clearly branded as AmarvelBio and displayed the “Hubei Amarvel Biotech Co., Ltd” watermark. One Firsky website and AmarvelBio’s ChemicalBook profile both displayed an image of the same factory.
AmarvelBio also has a ChemicalBook seller’s profile and displays a certificate (though “Amarvel” appears to be misspelled “Amarbel”) claiming to show it passed a third party quality inspection. An image of a certificate bearing an identical report number and date, but with Firsky listed under “company name”, was found on one of Firsky’s websites. Under the “General Comments” section, both the Amarvel and Firsky certificates contain a reference to “Huibei Amarbel Biotech Co., Ltd., located in Wuhan”.
The company said to have issued the certificates, SGS-CSTC Standards Technical Services Co. Ltd., told Bellingcat it was unable to verify the documents because they were incomplete.
Earlier this year, Bellingcat and the Estonian outlet Postimees investigated the online sale of nitazene opioids from Chinese suppliers. It found that entities involved in selling the super-strength drugs also used Russian Doll-like setups involving multiple companies sharing the same contact details, salespeople, advertisements and website layouts.
‘Room for Exploitation’
Illicit fentanyl sourced from China and Mexico has fueled the most lethal drug crisis in America’s history. The synthetic opioid is 50 times more potent than heroin – a dose as small as 2mg can be lethal. While fatalities have declined in recent years, the opioid epidemic killed more than 100,000 people between February 2022 and January 2023, and overdose remains the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 44.
The US government this year imposed tariffs on China aimed at putting pressure on Beijing to stem the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals into the country. In June, China added two fentanyl precursors to the list of controlled substances in what it described as an initiative to fulfill UN drug control obligations, reflecting its “attitude of actively participating in global drug governance”. At least one of these precursors has been advertised by AmarvelBio and its affiliated companies, including some listings that remain online on third-party trading websites.
Takehiro Masutomo, a Tokyo-based journalist and the author of Run Ri: Tracing the Footsteps of Chinese Elites Escaping to Japan, has written extensively about the new wave of immigration to Japan by Chinese people, who now make up that largest group of foreign residents in the country. He told Bellingcat that Japan was an attractive destination not only because of its proximity to China, cultural ties, and the relative ease with obtaining long-term residential status via business routes, but also because there were fewer regulatory barriers. He said this left “room for exploitation” by criminals.
“It’s really easy to set up a company here, and everything is cheap compared with other global cities. That’s the main reason,” Takehiro said. “I have been interviewing a lot of newly arrived Chinese people here, and I came across some people, including criminals. Japan may face a potential increase in financial crimes, including money laundering, involving individuals from China.”
Nikkei reported that Japan may have been chosen as a base because it is not widely associated with trafficking fentanyl precursors and therefore less likely to have shipments inspected. While Firsky has been liquidated in Japan, Nikkei said AmarvelBio’s network continues to operate in China. The whereabouts of Xia Fengzhi, described in US court documents as “the boss in Japan”, remain unknown.
In response to a question on the Breaking Bad forum about the case against AmarvelBio in 2023, a user tagged as an “AmarvelBio Vendor” said US sanctions have “no effect” on Chinese companies. “The only thing they can do is blocking [sic] our website,” they said. “This is no pain to us, we will build a lot of new websites”.
Xia Fengzhi did not respond to requests for comment from Nikkei. Lawyers for Wang and Chen, who are due to be sentenced this month, did not respond to requests for comment as of publication.
George Katz and Connor Plunkett contributed to this article.
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