- FinCEN warns US banks of industrial‑scale scam centers in Southeast Asia stealing billions
- Victims coerced into crypto “investments,” later re‑scammed with fake recovery fees
- Laundered via digital assets, mixers, shell firms, and Chinese underground banking networks
American financial institutions need to be more vigilant when it comes to identifying and preventing money scams, especially those perpetrated by industrial-scale scam centers in Southeast Asia.
This was the warning issued by the US Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) alongside a long list of red flags these institutions can monitor in order to stay safe.
Large, dangerous crime rings
The scams are not done by small groups of teenagers, tricking the elderly from the depths of their parents’ basement, but are often large, well-organized crime machines responsible for billions of dollars in damages, around the world, every year.
Latest Videos FromTechRadar
In 2025 alone, US victims lost more than $7.2 billion to these scams, the warning said, and between September 2023 and December 2025, nearly $13 billion was stolen from Americans.
The criminal organizations are primarily located in Cambodia, Burma, and Laos. They trafficked hundreds of thousands of people to various centers around the countries, taking their passports and forcing them into participating in online fraud. Those that don’t meet certain quotas are often beaten – and some victims were liberated after their families paid ransom demands, while others ended up being coerced into commercial sex work.
To make matters worse, they are resilient to law enforcement activities because some of them are either endorsed, or outright operated by, local corrupt officials.
FinCEN says the criminals are engaged in all sorts of fraudulent activity, but stressed that investment fraud is, by far, the most popular one. The scammers would reach out to their victim either pretending to be a romantic interest, or a financial advisor. Sometimes, they would even begin the conversation by saying they mistyped a phone number.
After extensively communicating with their victim for a while, they try to persuade them into making an “investment”, often using cryptocurrencies, and promising unrealistically high returns. This is also, FinCEN stresses, is when the scams can most easily be identified:
“Most digital asset payments by victims to scam center operators originate from money services businesses (MSBs) offering digital asset services, includingdigital asset kiosks, according to FinCEN analysis and law enforcement information. Based on FinCEN’s analysis of BSA reporting, scammers often instruct their victims to open accounts with MSBs offering digital asset services to purchase specific types of digital assets. Then, the victim is told to send these funds to a digital asset address controlled by the scammers.”
But defrauding victims out of their hard-earned money is not where the scam ends. Instead, the criminals continue, this time abusing the emotional distress to cause even more harm. They pose as law enforcement, financial institutions, or even FinCEN itself, stating that they’re investigating (or that they have confiscated the stolen funds) and that the victims should pay a certain fee to have their funds returned to them.
In some cases, the fraudsters pose as investment advisors, telling the victims to take out their money, buy gold and silver bars, and hand them over to a courier for “safe keeping”.
The full list of red flags can be found on this link, and FinCEN stresses that the circumstances around each individual case should be carefully considered, since no single red flag is “determinative of illicit or other suspicious activity.”
The circumstances include a customer’s historical financial activity, whether the transactions are in line with prevailing business practices, and whether the customer exhibits multiple related red flags.
Laundering the proceeds
Stealing the money is only half of the work, though. It still needs to be laundered and reintroduced into the legitimate financial system, and to do that, scam center operators rely on professional money launderers and Chinese money laundering networks.
FinCEN describes a three-stage process, in which the criminals first extract payments in digital assets using bank accounts, money mules, shell companies, or fraudulent money services businesses.
Next, during on-chain laundering, they obfuscate the origins of the stolen money by rapidly moving it across addresses, using mixers, and swapping tokens across blockchains. The last step is to integrate the funds into the traditional financial system via money mules, stablecoin transfers to offshore exchanges, and Chinese underground banking networks.
The best antivirus for all budgets
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/y7GLevUTEjLYdujEYsv668-2560-80.jpg
Source link
Sead Fadilpašić
