US Seeks Sanctions Against 28 Over Online Scam Racket

US lawmakers Brian Mast and John Moolenaar, chairs of the House Foreign Affairs and the Select Committee on China respectively, have written to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent demanding investigation and prosecution within 180 days of 28 foreign individuals and entities named in their letter to determine whether they meet sanctions criteria under the Global Magnitsky Act and other laws.

The letter states that Americans are being defrauded online at very high and continuously growing rates, driven primarily by Chinese transnational criminal networks based in Southeast Asia. These groups have built large industrial-scale compounds dedicated to sophisticated online fraud, including so-called "pig butchering" cryptocurrency scams that exploit Americans' goodwill through romance cons and other psychologically damaging schemes.

These scam centres can hold thousands of people, many of whom are themselves victims of human trafficking lured into prison-like compounds through force, fraud, or coercion, and forced to defraud Americans online or face severe physical abuse, torture, and sometimes death. An estimated 400,000 trafficking victims from over 70 countries are believed held in Southeast Asian scam compounds.

Senior government and regime officials in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos have ignored these crimes at alarming scale. Experts estimate cyber-fraud profits comprise nearly 40 percent of the combined GDP of the Greater Mekong subregion in 2024. Law enforcement efforts in these countries have largely been performative. In February 2025, The Economist reported that scammers are wealthy and powerful enough to corrupt entire governments, turning countries into cyber-scam narco-states, and that global revenue from online fraud likely equals illegal drug trafficking, one of the world's largest criminal industries.

In Myanmar, the military has conducted high-profile operations against two major scam compounds, Shwe Kokko and KK Park, but simultaneously allows scam centres to proliferate along the Myanmar-Thailand border at alarming rates. The Associated Press reported in June 2025 that at least 25 new scam sites have emerged since last autumn.

In Cambodia, scam profits may equal 60 percent of the country's official GDP. A May 2025 report revealed a clear pattern of state officials benefiting from scam operations, finding that "persistent corruption, trusted government protection, and complicity by party elites are the primary drivers of the nexus between human trafficking and cybercrime in Cambodia." Another June 2024 report found Cambodia's government investigation of scam compounds lacks rigour.