US Creates 'Strike Force' to Take Out SE Asian Scam Centers

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The collaborative effort combines multiple federal departments, along with private companies to reduce, if not eliminate, billions lost annually to fraud.

The success of cybercriminal scam centers in Burma, Cambodia, and Laos has drawn the collective attention of the US government, which has launched a collaborative effort to fight the criminal syndicates responsible for stealing billions of dollars from Americans.

Last week, the US departments of Justice, Treasury, State, and Homeland Security pledged to bring together initiatives by law enforcement, prosecutors, diplomats, and financial leaders in what officials dubbed a Scam Center Strike Force, a first for the US departments. The impetus to collaborate came from the massive damages caused by the scam centers, which stole more than $9 billion from Americans in 2024, according to officials, who also stated that the actual figure could be 15 times higher due to under-reporting.

The strike force aims to identity the entities behind the cryptocurrency scams, charge the leaders of the organizations, seize stolen funds, and shut down any infrastructure subject to US jurisdiction, Jeanine Ferris Pirro, US Attorney for the District of Washington DC, said during a Nov. 12 press conference .

"As the prosecuting office in the nation's capitol, we have the authority to charge foreign defendants and seize foreign property [and are] well situated to also engage with our partner agencies across the government," she said. "We have seized websites being used by these compounds in Southeast Asia that are used to victimize Americans and are seeking warrants to seize satellite terminals and accounts being used by the perpetrators to connect to the Internet."

Southeast Asian cybercrime syndicates have taken in tens of billions of dollars per year in stolen funds, usually from romance scams and fraudulent investment schemes — frequently referred to as "pig butchering" scams .

Adding to the difficulty in deterring the organized cybercrime groups is that their revenue often makes up a significant of the gross domestic product of the three main countries hosting scam centers: Burma, Cambodia, and Laos. Attackers stole between $18 billion and $37 billion from victims in the Southeast Asian region alone in 2023, 7% of the combined GDP of the those three countries . Losses from Western countries make up the lion's of the syndicates' profits, suggesting a much higher of GDP of those countries is related to criminal proceeds. Profits purportedly accounted for 40% of Cambodia's GDP in 2024, US officials said during the strike force press conference.

US officials placed the blame squarely on transnational Chinese organized crime. During the past year, the US Secret Service, for example, has worked with 3,000 victims of cryptocurrency investment schemes, resulting in the seizure or freezing of approximately $495 million in stolen cryptocurrency, Kyo Dolan, the assistant director for the US Secret Services' Office of Field Operations, said during the press conference.

Jeanine Ferris Pirro, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, announces the Scam Center Strike Force. Source: US DOJ video via YouTube

"Each Strike Force member agency brings unique expertise and capabilities that, when combined in a strategic and coordinated manner, will greatly impact our ability to combat these scams and dismantle the criminal organizations behind them," she said. "The US Secret Service will leverage our cryptocurrency tracing expertise as well as our network of skilled forensic accountants to trace stolen funds and identify impacted victims."

The State Department estimates that 400,000 people from more than 70 countries are subject to forced labor or even slavery in the compounds . The department will use visa restrictions to hinder travel of corrupt officials suspected of aiding cybercrime scam centers, offer rewards of up to $25 million for high-level figures in the transnational crime syndicates, and — along with the Treasury Department — sanction the entities that provide cyber infrastructure to the organizations .

The collaborative effort between US agencies could be very effective and is a step that the US is well positioned to take, says Trey Ford, chief strategy and trust officer for crowdsourced security firm Bugcrowd. The US — and possibly China and the European Union — have the influence to blunt the impact of the cybercriminal syndicates and get their host countries to be less welcoming.

"Providing safe harbor for known criminal groups is the very definition of acting in bad faith," Ford said. "The US government alone is well positioned to apply pressure in a variety of forms to incentivize partnership in these take-downs."

The US agencies have already shown that a holistic approach can deliver significant dividends. In October, a group of US agencies announced that they had seized 127,271 bitcoin kept in two dozen "unhosted wallets" — worth nearly $15 billion at the time of the announcement. Such payoffs show the value of a broad approach that uses the expertise and capabilities of the different government agencies, says Jacqueline Koven, head of cyber threat intelligence at blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis.

"The action represents the largest-ever coordinated effort targeting crypto-enabled scam networks in Southeast Asia, including a historic bitcoin seizure," she says. "These operations show that when agencies work across jurisdictions, they can meaningfully disrupt the infrastructure and financial flows behind scam centers."

Yet, even that significant win still leaves the US and other countries far from solving the problem of the vast cybercriminal syndicates. A number of private companies are also pledging to help solve the problem. Both Meta and Microsoft have indicated that they will help the strike force, according to Pirro, who expects other Internet, telecommunications, and service providers to step up.

"We're calling on all US providers to assist us because, left unchecked, this [problem of scam centers] will continue to grow, and it will grow on the networks that we talked , resulting in US users believing they can no longer trust these platforms to be safe," she said. "We want to work with United States partners in a public-private partnership to ensure that these corrupt scammers will immediately be cut off, thus preventing the United States infrastructure from being used as a means to perpetrate fraud against Americans."

In July, Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-NH, called for SpaceX to restrict the use of its Starlink satellite network by scam centers, following reports that the satellite Internet provider appears to be a favored technology among the scam compounds .

Robert Lemos, Contributing Writer

Veteran technology journalist of more than 20 years. Former research engineer. Written for more than two dozen publications, including CNET News.com, Dark Reading, MIT's Technology Review, Popular Science, and Wired News. Five awards for journalism, including Best Deadline Journalism (Online) in 2003 for coverage of the Blaster worm. Crunches numbers on various trends using Python and R. Recent reports include analyses of the shortage in cybersecurity workers and annual vulnerability trends.

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