The Scam Center Strike Force recently conducted a series of coordinated actions against Southeast Asian criminal organizations operating scam centers that have defrauded Americans of billions of dollars.
“We have charged the Chinese bosses who ran a scam compound in Burma, where trafficked workers were beaten and forced to steal from Americans,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro said. “We have seized a Telegram channel that was luring workers into a forced labor compound in Cambodia where they were ordered to pose as U.S. banks and NYPD to steal American’s life savings. We have taken down more than 500 websites used to steal people’s savings. And my office continues to work to identify funds stolen from victims, having now caused restraint of more than $700 million in cryptocurrency involved in money laundering from U.S. victims of fraud.”
Investment scams were the top reported crime type in 2023, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, with cryptocurrency investment fraud comprising 83 percent. Reported losses were more than $7.2 billion last year, a 24 percent increase from 2024.
Many cyber-enabled and cryptocurrency investment fraud schemes are run out of industrial-scale compounds in Cambodia along the Burma-Thailand border. Criminal syndicates lure workers with promises of high-paying technical jobs then traffic them to work in scam compounds.