5 hours ago
4
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
The U.S., Britain and South Korea have joined a crackdown on groups running frauds from Southeast Asia. They have their work cut out.
Francesca Regalado has reported on Southeast Asia’s scam industry from the Thailand-Myanmar border.
Oct. 23, 2025, 2:26 a.m. ET
The Treasury Department says Americans have lost more than $16.6 billion to an online scam industry largely based in Southeast Asia that targets victims around the world.
Scam centers rely on forced labor, and they proliferated during the pandemic. By some estimates they take in at least $64 billion a year.
The authorities in several countries have been trying to rescue people who were kidnapped and enslaved to work as scammers. But even though the United States and Britain recently imposed sanctions on a Cambodian company accused of running a major scam operation, experts say it will take a lot more work to build cases against the criminal syndicates powering the industry.
Here’s how centers work and why they’re so hard to shut down:
Scammers target victims by winning their trust on social media.
Southeast Asia’s online fraudsters specialize in “pig butchering,” a process in which a scammer builds trust with a victim over weeks or months before asking them to invest in a fraudulent cryptocurrency fund. In that sense they are like farmers fattening pigs for slaughter.
The victim often receives a message from someone posing as a financial adviser on Facebook, WhatsApp or Telegram. Then the scammer instructs the person to transfer money through a website pretending to be a legitimate investment platform. In 2023, the president of a small bank in Kansas did just that, losing about $47 million of the bank’s money to pig butchers.
Image
