The compound at O’Smach sits on Cambodia’s northern border with Thailand, and by the accounts of U.S. prosecutors, United Nations researchers and reporters who have been inside such sites, it works in shifts. Fake profiles open conversations on social apps, an investment dashboard is built to look like a trading terminal, and the money that arrives does so in wallets that only ever accept deposits.
For years, Washington treated what happens in buildings like that one as a foreign police problem. It has stopped doing so.
On Sept. 16, FBI Director Kash Patel told lawmakers that the bureau had seized $17 billion tied to international scam centers, freed thousands of trafficked workers and made hundreds of arrests in operations spanning Southeast Asia and the Middle East, under an effort the FBI calls Operation Blackout.
The scale of the losses explains the shift. In its 2025 Internet Crime Report, released this year, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded 1,008,597 complaints, the first time in its 25-year history that the count passed a million, and $20.877 billion in reported losses, a 26% increase from $16.6 billion in 2024. Investment fraud was once again the largest single category, and the report singled out cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence as the technologies reshaping how victims are found and persuaded. The average reported loss was $20,699.
The State Department has put a narrower figure on the damage from the compounds themselves: Americans lost at least $18.2 billion to scam centers operating out of Southeast Asia in 2025, up from $10 billion in 2024. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated in July that victims across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand lost between $88.3 billion and $114.1 billion last year, at least triple the 2023 figure.
The mechanics of the business have changed less than its reach. A victim is approached on a dating app or a messaging platform, court filings describe weeks of patient courtship, and then a cryptocurrency investment that shows returns on a dashboard the victim alone can see. A small withdrawal is usually permitted early, which is the point. The scam consumes not a single payment but a relationship, and the second ask is always larger than the first.
Enforcement has broadened to match. The Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force has brought charges against two Chinese nationals accused of managing a cryptocurrency investment fraud compound in Burma and attempting to open another in Cambodia, and it seized a Telegram channel used to recruit workers and victims. In September, the department and Britain’s National Crime Agency signed an agreement to run parallel investigations and share intelligence on the syndicates behind the compounds, most of which are run from the region’s border zones.
International coordination has produced its own numbers. An Interpol operation from January to April, funded in part by China’s Ministry of Public Security, involved 97 countries and territories and produced more than 5,800 arrests, the interception of $293 million in illicit assets and the blocking of 31,014 bank accounts, according to a congressional research report published last month.
Technology companies have joined in unevenly. Meta said it worked with the Justice Department, the Royal Thai Police and other agencies in a June operation that disrupted more than 1.4 million online assets linked to the networks. In the most recent joint disruption week, announced Oct 13, the department and Meta targeted operations in Nigeria, Ghana and elsewhere in West Africa, where the organizations tend to be smaller and more decentralized than the compound-based businesses of Southeast Asia, analysts said.
The people who staff the operations are frequently victims too. Compounds recruit through job advertisements for translators, customer service workers and software developers, then hold passports and enforce quotas; the bureau’s account of its raids included the release of thousands of trafficked workers. The State Department has offered multimillion-dollar rewards for information leading to the arrest of people behind the largest networks, an acknowledgment that the operators, not the workers, are the scarce input in the business.
Governments in the region have also moved. Cambodia says 210,000 foreigners have left the country voluntarily since a crackdown began, that nearly 200 compounds have been shut and that 172 ringleaders and accomplices have been arrested and convicted since June. Each of those figures is contested by researchers who track the industry, and the compounds that close in one jurisdiction have a habit of appearing in another.
That is the unresolved part. Arrests, seizures and platform takedowns have risen together with the losses they are meant to reduce, and the trajectory of a market that settles transactions in minutes is not easily bent by enforcement that moves in months. The victims in the FBI’s complaint database are a lagging indicator: they report after the money is gone, often after a relationship they believed in has been revealed as a script read from a desk in a border town.
What the bureau has done is change the target. It no longer describes the fraud as a series of consumer mistakes but as an industry with payrolls, managers and real estate, and it has begun attacking those rather than the calls. Whether that shrinks the business or moves it across the next border is a question the seizure totals will not answer, and the complaint totals next year will.
