Americans Lost $18.2 Billion in Mostly Chinese-Run Scam Operations: Report

Americans lost at least $18.2 billion to scam operations based in compounds in Southeast Asia in 2025, according to the State Department’s latest trafficking report.

The report frames the operations as involving forced labor and forced criminal activity rather than conventional cyberfraud.

According to the report, most of the compounds are run by Chinese nationals, and Beijing has used the spread of these centers to expand its security presence in the region.

The report says transnational criminal organizations, “mostly run by Chinese nationals in Southeast Asia, but increasingly in other regions,” have targeted millions of people and defrauded the global economy of billions of dollars a year. 

The U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission found that recruiters have drawn hundreds of thousands of people from at least 80 countries into the compounds. Many are confined, threatened, or beaten, then forced to run cryptocurrency, romance, and illegal-gambling scams, with Americans being the primary targets.

“Chinese national-operated crime syndicates subject Chinese nationals and foreign victims to forced criminality and other forms of trafficking in online scam operations, primarily in Burma, Cambodia, and Laos,” the report said. 

During the reporting period, Chinese officials, working in Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, arrested and returned thousands of “suspects” from these operations to China, according to the report.

The Chinese regime did not screen any of them for trafficking indicators and “almost always viewed those arrested as criminals,” the report says. Some victims were later labeled “coerced accomplices” and given pardons or lighter sentences.

Foreign investigators also reported trouble pursuing scam cases inside special economic zones in Lower Mekong countries, citing unresponsiveness from Chinese counterparts and jurisdictional barriers, according to the report.

Prosecutors worldwide brought 24,254 trafficking cases in 2025; 5,741 were labor-only filings. Courts returned 7,576 convictions, 1,391 of them in labor cases. Officials identified 156,912 victims, including 43,342 in labor trafficking, according to the report, which was released on Thursday and covers April 1, 2025, through March 31, 2026.

State Department spokesman Thomas Pigott said the report “reveals new ways criminal organizations and repressive regimes use this abhorrent practice for financial gain” and “calls for accountability for governments that fail to punish traffickers and protect their citizens.”

He added that the Trump administration would use “all available tools to fight traffickers and their enablers and bring them to justice.”

The report ranks 12 countries as Tier 3—the bottom tier—for a policy or pattern of trafficking and for failing to meet the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s minimum standards or to make significant efforts to do so.

These are Afghanistan, Belarus, Burma, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Russia, South Sudan, and Sudan.

Tier 3 status can restrict certain U.S. foreign assistance. The department also flagged Hong Kong, Macau, Laos, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Sint Maarten.

The China section in the report says the Chinese regime “does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so.”

Cuba’s labor-export program, including its medical missions, is described in the report as a government policy of forced labor. Regime-affiliated workers abroad fell from 24,000 at the start of 2025 to between 15,000 and 18,000 in 2026. The department credits U.S. diplomatic engagement for the drop.

The country rankings are largely unchanged from a year ago. The 2025 report, released on Sept. 29, 2025, kept China in Tier 3 for a sixth straight year. That edition, citing the International Labour Organization, put state-imposed forced labor at an estimated 3.9 million people worldwide.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote then that trafficking “is a horrific and devastating crime that also enriches transnational criminal organizations and immoral, anti-American regimes.”