Plain-clothed police officers detain Chinese nationals following a raid on a shophouse in Batam, Indonesia, Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2023. (AP Photo/Andaru)

Last year, Americans lost over $10 billion dollars to sophisticated online scamming operations run out of Southeast Asia. Last week, the Department of Justice seized $15 billion in Bitcoin from the Cambodia-based “forced labor scam compound,” Prince Holding Group.

These aren’t opportunistic internet cons. They are industrial fraud factories — fortified compounds run by China-originated transnational crime syndicates, protected by corrupt officials and the formal institutions they control and powered by the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims lured from nearly 80 countries. And they are now one of the largest forms of financial crime hitting Americans.

Congress is finally drawing a line. A bipartisan bill in the Senate, a bipartisan endorsed State Department Reauthorization amendment and a related stand-alone bill in the House all explicitly name this phenomenon for what it is: a critical threat to U.S. national security.

The urgency could not be clearer. Scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos have metastasized into sprawling criminal empires, running crypto fraud, romance scam, online gambling, money laundering and even child-sextortion rackets at an unprecedented scale.

They target Americans deliberately: Our bank accounts are attractive targets, our cyber defenses are weak and Beijing has proven happy to look the other way, so long as the victims aren’t Chinese.

Over the last four years, the three of us have spoken to countless trafficking survivors who were lured into the compounds by fake job ads, then beaten, starved or tortured if they failed to meet their scam quotas. We’ve heard from just as many Americans who have lost everything — life savings, retirement funds, homes — often on platforms that looked indistinguishable from legitimate ones.

We’ve listened to law enforcement from the U.S. and around the world about how they lack the tools to follow the money, track the criminals and recover the losses. And, we’ve dived deep into investigations of the organized crime groups, the criminalized states and warlords that support them and the malign geopolitical currents keeping the whole racket in motion.

The depravity runs in every direction, it is: slavery and torture for the trafficked, financial ruin for the scammed and their families, endless enrichment for the crime bosses and their sovereign backers who are systematically turning their countries into de facto scam states.

The Dismantle Foreign Scam Syndicates Act in particular, tackles the problem at its root. It mandates creation of a national task force, chaired by the secretary of State, to cut across bureaucratic silos.

It compels a comprehensive national strategy. Critically, it names and demands real accountability for a long list of known criminal conglomerates like Cambodia’s Prince Group and Huione, and Myanmar’s Yatai IHG** **and Fully Light Group, as well as the local elite co-conspirators who have enabled them to operate with impunity for too long.

Of course, this will all cost money. But the return is clear: billions saved, lives freed and U.S. influence restored in a region where crime has become the dominant economic engine and a weapon of statecraft.

Congress will act if Americans demand it. Your member needs to hear from you — today.

Urge them to cosponsor the Dismantle Foreign Scam Syndicates Act in the House or the Scam Compound Accountability and Mobilization Act in the Senate and to join the Anti-Scam Caucus. Without assertive action, these massive financial crimes against Americans will continue to rage unchecked.

The region’s flourishing scam economy will not dismantle itself. It’s become too big to fail in the epicenter countries and Beijing is actively instrumentalizing the crisis for its own ends, directly displacing costs onto American citizens in the process. We’ll certainly need partners, but the onus is on the U.S.

If our government is truly serious about making Americans safer, stronger and more secure, there is no clearer test case than this.

Jacob Sims is a fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center. Erin West the founder and CEO of Operation Shamrock. Jason Tower is a visiting fellow at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.

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