28.02.2024
15 min
1523
An investigation in collaboration with the Japanese newspaper Nikkei revealed that the Chinese company AmarvelBio, known as one of the key suppliers of precursors for the production of fentanyl, had close ties to the Japanese company Firsky. Through a complex web of domains, contacts and corporate registrations, the investigators discovered that these structures were actually part of the same scheme. Using Japan as a cover made it possible to avoid suspicion and legalize supply channels.
Earlier this year, a man and a woman appeared in court in New York on drug trafficking charges. They were arrested as part of an undercover operation by the U.S. 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 United States. Authorities said the amount was enough to make 25 million lethal doses of the drug.
The Chinese nationals were also charged with conspiring to import tons of fentanyl precursors into the United States, where opioid overdoses kill tens of thousands of people each year. After a two-week trial, a Manhattan jury found them guilty of conspiracy to import fentanyl precursors and conspiracy to launder money.
Qingzhou “Bruce” Wang, 36, and Ye “Chyron” Chen, 32, worked for Hubei Amarvel Biotech (AmarvelBio), a chemical company based in Wuhan, China. They were arrested in 2023 after being lured from China to Fiji in a DEA operation and later extradited to the United States. The case marked the first time that U.S. authorities have prosecuted Chinese company executives for trafficking fentanyl precursors.
But court documents suggested there may be links to another East Asian country. Bellingcat was contacted by the Japanese newspaper Nikkei, which was investigating AmarvelBio’s ties to Japan, suspecting that the country was being used as a command post for a cross-border smuggling operation.
The Nikkei newspaper investigated the case of Xia Fengzhi, a Chinese man who was dubbed “Boss Japan” in a New York court case. It found an individual with that name listed as the owner of a Chinese chemical raw material company called Fushikai Trading Co Ltd, which the Nikkei said operated under the brand name “Firsky.” The Firsky China website listed a Fushikai Trading certificate with the same identification number as Fushikai’s corporate records. The company, according to its website, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Firsky Co. Ltd., registered in Nagoya, an industrial city in central Japan.
Nikkei obtained corporate records from Firsky in Japan that show Xia was the head of the company. Records obtained by Nikkei also showed that the Chinese company’s CEO was listed as Qingzhou Wang, the same name as one of two AmarvelBio executives convicted in the United States.
Nikkei asked Bellingcat’s financial investigations team to use their expertise in open source research to independently verify the Japanese company’s connection to AmarvelBio. Our investigation uncovered evidence that suggests the two companies are not just part of the same international smuggling ring – they are, in fact, the same company. Here’s how we did it.
It was impossible to link AmarvelBio and Firsky through domain records because both websites were registered through a provider that uses privacy protections that hide personal data from the public. However, information obtained by U.S. law enforcement could become public during legal proceedings.
CourtListener’s RECAP Advanced Search is a free tool used by the nonprofit Free Law Project that allows users to search millions of federal court documents available through the Public Access to Electronic Court Records (PACER) service.
A search query for “amarvelbio.com” in CourtListener yielded several results, including evidence from a federal case against AmarvelBio. It contained domain registration data obtained through a subpoena that showed that convicted AmarvelBio employee Her “Chiron” Chen had registered a number of domains, including for AmarvelBio, its “subsidiary” Wuhan Wingroup, and Firsky (both in China and Japan).
Another domain (firskytech.com), not listed in the documents available on CourtListener, was registered a few months after Chen’s arrest in 2023 and remains online at the time of publication. This website listed an address in Wuhan and described itself as a wholly Japanese-owned supplier of “high-purity” chemical intermediates. While its registration details remain confidential, the contact email address listed on the site uses the Firsky China domain – “firsky-cn.com” – which was registered by Chen and thus linked to the network.
Bellingcat also found Chen’s personal Gmail address in the source code of three website archives (here, here, and here), which were both in the registration records obtained by subpoena and on a list of 12 domains that US authorities seized after linking them to AmarvelBio, further corroborating its involvement.
Additional domain connections between AmarvelBio and the Japanese version of Firsky were found in archived ads from the darknet marketplace Breaking Bad, which were found through the leak aggregator intelx.io. The ads for the chemicals were placed under AmarvelBio’s rebranded name, AmarvelTech, after the Chinese company was indicted in 2023.
Some of the ads led to whrchem.com, one of the 12 websites seized by the DEA. Domain records discovered through intelx.io showed that whrchem.com was controlled by two email accounts, one of which used the domain for Firsky Japan – “firsky-jp.com”. The same email address is also listed as the “author” in the whrchem.com archive.
Analysis of AmarvelBio and Firsky profiles, advertisements and sellers revealed further connections between the two companies, including recycled phone numbers, photos, watermarks, company biographies and certificates of compliance that could not be verified.
Searches for “Firsky” on the “Breaking Bad” forum yielded an existing seller profile named “Cindy,” whose contact website was listed as bmkpmkbdo.com. The site’s 2024 archive contains Cindy’s WhatsApp number, which the search shows was previously used in an AmarvelBio ad posted on “Breaking Bad.”
Firsky has a seller profile with over 350 active listings on the e-commerce platform ChemicalBook. But in one ad, under the company description, Firsky is interchangeably described as AmarvelBio.
While many of Firsky’s advertisements contained stock images with its watermark, some of the products Firsky advertised were clearly labeled as AmarvelBio and had the watermark “Hubei Amarvel Biotech Co., Ltd.” One of Firsky’s websites and AmarvelBio’s ChemicalBook profile featured the same plant.
AmarvelBio also has a ChemicalBook seller profile and displays a certificate (although “Amarvel” appears to be misspelled as “Amarbel”) that claims the company has passed a third-party quality inspection. An image of the certificate with an identical report number and date, but with Firsky listed in the “company name” section, was found on one of Firsky’s websites. In the “General Comments” section, the Amarvel and Firsky certificates reference “Huibei Amarbel Biotech Co., Ltd., located in Wuhan.”
The company that allegedly issued the certificates, SGS-CSTC Standards Technical Services Co. Ltd., said it could not verify the documents because they were incomplete.
Illicit fentanyl, sourced from China and Mexico, has fueled the deadliest drug crisis in American history. This synthetic opioid is 50 times more potent than heroin—even a dose as small as 2 mg can be fatal. While deaths have declined in recent years, the opioid epidemic killed more than 100,000 people between February 2022 and January 2023, and overdoses remain the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 44.
This year, the U.S. government imposed tariffs on China in an effort to pressure Beijing to stop the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals into the country. In June, China added two fentanyl precursors to its list of controlled substances as part of what it called an initiative to fulfill UN drug control commitments, reflecting its “active engagement in global drug governance.” At least one of those precursors was advertised by AmarvelBio and its affiliates, including some listings that remain online on third-party trading websites.
Takehiro Masutomo, a Tokyo-based journalist and author of “Run Ri: In the Footsteps of China’s Elites Fleeing to Japan,” has written extensively about the new wave of immigration to Japan by Chinese nationals, who now make up the country’s largest group of foreign residents. He said Japan is an attractive destination not only because of its proximity to China, cultural ties, and the relative ease of obtaining long-term residency status through business routes, but also because there are fewer regulatory barriers. He said this leaves “room for exploitation” by criminals.
“It’s really easy to set up a company here, and everything is cheap compared to other cities in the world. That’s the main reason,” Takehiro said. “I’ve interviewed many new Chinese arrivals and met some people, including criminals. Japan could face a potential increase in financial crimes, including money laundering, involving Chinese individuals.”
The Nikkei newspaper reported that Japan may have been chosen as a base because it doesn’t have a widespread connection to the fentanyl precursor trade, making its shipments less likely to be checked. While Firsky was liquidated in Japan, the Nikkei said the AmarvelBio network continues to operate in China. The whereabouts of Xia Fengzhi, who is described in U.S. 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 identified as “AmarvelBio Vendor” said that the US sanctions “do not affect” Chinese companies. “The only thing they can do is block [sic] our website,” they said. “It is not a problem for us, we will create many new websites.”
Xia Fengzhi did not respond to Nikkei’s requests for comment. Lawyers for Wang and Chen, who are due to be sentenced this month, did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
