Scammers are open for business. Washington isn’t.
Your phone buzzes. 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 noting the true figure is closer to $200 billion due to underreporting. Globally, the picture is darker, with over $1 trillion stolen from consumers in a single year. 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. Meanwhile, the U.S. 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 through trusted platforms and communication channels. Scam investment ads litter social media, and platforms fail to crackdown since they profit from the ad revenue. Meanwhile, scam calls with a fraudulent caller ID or an area code that matches your hometown do not magically appear. Scammers take advantage of tools like call spoofing, and American companies paid to route that call collect a fee whether it’s fraudulent or not.
While it’s fair to consider this a consumer protection problem, it’s also a national security issue. In Cambodia, where scamming makes up nearly half the country’s gross domestic product, a high ranking political figure was sanctioned for his ties to scam compounds, and a financial institution was caught laundering scam proceeds to fund North Korean cyberattacks. Most concerning is the conduct of the Chinese Communist Party, whose selective enforcement cracked down on scammers targeting Chinese citizens while operations targeting Americans remain untouched.
Our government has the tools to respond but has lacked the coordination and will. Three priorities should define the response.
First, directly target the compounds and their host nations. The Treasury and State departments have begun multiple enforcement actions, sanctioning criminal kingpins and scam center networks across Myanmar and Cambodia. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has leveraged the newly created Scam Center Strike Force alongside President Trump’s executive order calling for action against scam centers. This is encouraging, but falls short of a comprehensive strategy.
Sanctions without sustained diplomatic and intelligence follow-through could lead to stalled momentum as administrations change. The U.S. must treat these networks as the national security threat they are, with durable, cross-agency commitments. Allies who shelter these operations should face consequences, and that message must be delivered consistently. Bipartisan legislation that addresses this, the Scam Compound Accountability and Mobilization Act, passed the Senate in 2025, but the House has failed to take it up.
Next, we must tear down the walls between institutions fighting scams domestically. Legal liability concerns and outdated regulations prevent banks from sharing vital information. A bank that spots a scam attempt should be able to alert peer institutions without fear of litigation. This should extend to cross-industry information sharing with law enforcement, telecoms, tech companies, and others. Congress should pass legal safe harbors for institutions that share fraud intelligence in good faith.
Finally, social media platforms, digital advertisers, and back-end call routing companies (distinct from consumer facing carriers) must be held accountable. These actors are the passive beneficiaries of the fraud economy: platforms profit from fraudulent advertising and intermediary telecoms profit from carrying fraudulent calls. Platforms should implement stronger ad verification standards, and telecom middlemen should bear greater legal responsibility for the traffic on their networks. A government remedy does not need to be heavy-handed, but given the unwillingness to alter business practices, it may be necessary. Bipartisan legislation like the Safeguarding Consumers from Advertising Misconduct Act is a good start.
Despite these challenges, there is reason for optimism. The technology to fight back is improving. Machine learning systems can now flag fraud patterns in real time across transaction networks. Blockchain analytics firms can trace and freeze cryptocurrency proceeds with remarkable precision. The FBI’s Operation Level Up, launched in 2024, proactively identified and contacted thousands of victims before their losses compounded, a promising model that may be scalable.
Even artificial intelligence, fraudsters’ newest weapon, cuts both ways. The same pattern recognition that makes AI-generated scams convincing also makes them detectable. But technology without political will is just potential. Americans are being robbed at an industrial scale, using our own digital infrastructure against us. That is the kind of threat the federal government exists to confront.
Congress should act. The administration should lead. And domestic players that willfully turn a blind eye should come to the table, instead of waiting for laws and regulations to force them there.