Outreach All Outreach Letters Testimony Regulatory Comments Share via Email: Scammers%20are%20open%20for%20business.%20Washington%20isn’t. Share via Facebook: Scammers%20are%20open%20for%20business.%20Washington%20isn’t. Share via X: Scammers%20are%20open%20for%20business.%20Washington%20isn’t. A text from an unknown number alerts you to an unpaid toll. Next, a call comes in with the name of your bank, claiming your account is compromised. Later, you see an ad for a celebrity-endorsed crypto investment on social media. The problem is, it’s all fraudulent. The bigger problem is, it’s coming from an increasingly sophisticated trillion-dollar criminal scam industry. And the federal government has largely been negligent in its response. The numbers are staggering. The Federal Trade Commission’s consumer-reported scam data shows $12.5 billion lost in 2024 alone, while noti…

If these statistics seem inconsistent, it’s because they are, given that we lack a centralized scam tracking system and rely mostly on self-reporting. And while statistics on financial recovery are similarly hard to nail down, the consensus is that restitution is uncommon and challenging. Behind these losses, transnational criminal syndicates run massive scam compounds, largely in southeast Asia, housing trafficked and enslaved workers who carry out romance scams, crypto schemes, and impersonation fraud. According to United Nations estimates, this scam workforce includes 300,000 laborers from 66 countries, nearly half of whom are kept within scam compounds in Myanmar and Cambodia. Treasury Department says that Americans lost at least $10 billion to Southeast Asia-based scam operations in 2024 — a 66 percent increase over the prior year. These criminals reach us throug…