Thieves no longer need crowbars and masks. Instead, they creep through wires and screens. Unlike home burglaries, scammers convince victims to transfer their savings or provide access to a financial account without leaving a physical trace. In the digital age, it is nearly impossible to find someone who has not been targeted by a scam.
Despite their omnipresence, very few understand the underlying insidious criminal machinery and global scale behind scams. Modern fraudsters aren’t just lone hackers in dark basements. Scams are driven by multinational criminal syndicates, fueled by human trafficking, modern slavery, and government corruption and failure. Scam centers- where trafficking victims are coerced to operate online scams that trick victims into giving away money or personal information- are at the heart of a brutal and evil network orchestrated to steal your savings.
Despite this, relative to issues like drug trafficking, scams remain largely overlooked by U.S. public advocacy and media and remain astonishingly absent in national policy. Successful scams must be isolated incidents then, right? Think again. In fact, these criminal systems are one of the most dangerous threats to the U.S. and global economy today.
Magnitude: The Global Scam Economy and American Costs
Due to its covert nature, it is hard to estimate the true size of the international scam economy. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s Internet Crime Report details that Americans’ reported losses exceeded $16 billion in 2024.1 Due to vast underreporting of incidents, the actual number is undoubtedly much larger. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) estimates that $1.03 trillion was stolen in scams globally in 2024, with American victims bearing the largest impact per victim.
Alone, scams would account for the 20th largest national economy in the world, larger than sizable economies like Switzerland, Argentina, and Ireland. In 2024, estimated digital scam thefts were 60% larger than the revenue of the world’s largest company–Walmart.
The FBI’s $16 billion in reported U.S. losses figure rivals the entire 2024 budget of the U.S. Department of State and is approximately 100 times larger than the 2024 budget for the Department of Labor.
Scams and the international economy they have created are an immensely costly problem for Americans. Every day, an estimated 57,000 people in the U.S. fall victim to scams. These daily victims alone are enough to fill a Major League Baseball (MLB) stadium.
Beyond financial hardships, victims also experience extreme psychological damage.
Tragically, some victims have died by suicide as a result of such crimes. Sextortion, blackmailing using intimate images gained by pretending to be someone else through an online platform, claims adolescent lives each year. The FBI has reported that at least 30 teenage boys have died by suicide due to their victimhood in sextortion scams.
The financial and emotional toll of the scam economy has devastated victims across the U.S. and around the world. To stop this growing crisis, we must first understand how it began and why it continues to thrive.
Criminal Industrialization: How Scam Centers Operate
Origination
Many Americans’ perception of cyber scams derives from their low-tech origination alongside the internet decades ago. “Nigerian Princes” crafted poorly written mass email campaigns promising millions of dollars to entrusted strangers that were willing to pay urgent advanced fees. Victims felt ashamed; a feeling that continues to be the groundwork for scammers’ success. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) estimates that only 15% of scam victims ever report the crime.
Unfortunately, scammers have evolved as quickly as the internet itself with the COVID-19 pandemic only supercharging digital scams evolution. During shutdowns, infrastructure from failing businesses like casinos were converted into scam centers. These operations thrive where governments fail–countries with widespread corruption, weak governance, and a lack of legitimate economic opportunity.
However, just like legitimate corporations, criminal groups leverage access to basic infrastructure like roads, office buildings, and internet. Because many scam centers are often located in rural areas in developing countries, internet is generally procured from satellite companies including regional providers and global providers like the American-based Starlink and Intelsat and the European-based Eutelsat.
In Southeast Asia, scam economies have prospered where traditional businesses have not. With their stolen earnings, criminal syndicates funded the construction of brand-new compounds in otherwise barren and impoverished regions. In war-torn Myanmar, the Chinese mafia operates ruthless scam compounds in isolation from governance and with protection from armed rebel groups. In Cambodia, pervasive government corruption protects organized criminal syndicates like the Bamboo Mafia and their nefarious scam centers.
While business models and scam types differ, similar conditions protect and enable scam operations in West African countries such as Nigeria and Ghana (romance scams), India (tech support and phishing scams), and Russia (ransomware) among others.
Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery
Businesses require labor to operate and grow. While many Americans encounter labor in the form of paid employees or consenting volunteers, Southeast Asian criminal syndicates often scale their scam businesses through human trafficking and enslavement.
Human trafficking into scam centers is not a rare occurrence. The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) estimates that roughly “305,000 individuals are trapped in scam centers…” across Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos alone. Scam-related human trafficking and enslavement is not exclusive to Southeast Asia. INTERPOL found that “evidence that the MO is being replicated in other regions such as West Africa, where cyber-enabled financial crime is already prevalent.” Victims originate from at least 66 countries across the world. 8
Matthew Friedman, CEO of the non-profit The Mekong Club designed to combat modern slavery, explains, “There are job recruiters for these syndicates that conduct seemingly official job interviews over Zoom.” While not interviewing for an authentic job, “recruiters are in fact interviewing individuals whose skills would best fit for their operations.” Ultimately, victims are driven or boated across borders, stripped of their personal belongings, and held against their will in scam centers.
In 2025, Amnesty International gathered information from 423 victims of Cambodian scam compounds. They gathered testimony of victims living in confined prison-like conditions where “almost all 53 scamming compounds identified…had physical and organizational security features” like cameras, barbed wire, electric fences, and guarded gates with security personnel that also perpetrated abuses.
Victims that refuse to participate in scamming activities or fail to meet daily quotas are subject to heinous crimes, including beatings, starvation, torture, and rape. Electric shock batons are used routinely. In one instance, a survivor reported to Amnesty International “having a plastic bag placed over his head before being threatened with a knife placed between his legs…” and threats of “gang-raping his wife, who was also being held at the compound.”
Roles
Like legitimate companies, scam centers have specialized roles. While some administrative jobs loosely mirror lawful occupations, other roles are alarmingly brutal. Alongside recruiters, human traffickers, torturers, and security, other roles include:
- Data Gatherers: Acquiring personally identifiable information (PII) like social security numbers, passports, email addresses, IP addresses, or health information. Information is purchased illegally via the dark web from other data breaches or phishing, acquired through public records and social media.
- Social Engineers: Each scam involves a different degree of emotional manipulation. Scammers specialize in manipulating victims into trusting them as legitimate–whether it be an email impersonating a bank to lure a victim into clicking on a malicious link, or slowly constructing a fictitious online relationship for financial exploitation. Some create transcripts and instructions for trafficked victims to recite during scam attempts.
- Money Mules: In these international criminal schemes, money mules receive and transfer stolen funds to launder money and hide its origin. These individuals are based across several borders, including many in the U.S. who use fake or stolen identities to open bank accounts, transfer money across, or convert funds into cryptocurrencies to evade detection.
Unfortunately, even rescues for enslaved victims in scam compounds factor into the industry’s profit model. LING LI, a modern slavery field researcher in Cambodia, assists in facilitating victim rescues. In one case, despite collecting evidence and submitting requisite documentation to Cambodian officials, perpetrators called the victim’s family and made them listen as the victim was beaten (for seeking help). “The criminals also provided a phone number to negotiate a ransom with the family. But this was not just any number. Criminals claimed it belonged to a “rescue team” and insisted they would only “work” with that team.” By hijacking even the rescue process itself, legitimate rescue organizations consider successful rescue missions nearly impossible.
Minimizing costs through slave labor, criminal syndicate kingpins also known as “scam bosses” receive an immense concentration of the stolen fortunes with corrupt government officials, enforcers, militia groups, and other operational managers receiving small shares.
The Slowest Gazelle: An American Problem
Of the largest developed national economies, the United States is the clear prey of choice for scammers. Li finds that over half of Cambodian scam center rescues report that the U.S. was their primary target for scams. These scam centers target Americans with a wide array of scams from pig butchering- online scams using fake personas to coerce victims into fraudulent investments- and romance scams to fake classes (e.g. how to become an influencer).
Governmental Ambiguity
While the U.S. is the world’s largest economy, it is also among the least prepared of its peer countries. Would you know which government agency to contact after falling victim to a scam? This murkiness exists due to the lack of a unified government body dedicated to combatting fraud. In its current state, there is no strategic coordination across government bodies. In fact, there is not even an established goal to curb scams.
While lacking established goals and structure, the United States efforts to fight scamming, still demonstrate powerful moments of justice. In early 2025, a Nigerian man was extradited for his role in the sextortion-induced suicide of South Carolina teen Gavin Guffey.14 In August 2025, the U.S. extradited high-ranking officials of an international criminal group from Ghana for romance scams that resulted in over $100 million in stolen money from Americans.15 Unfortunately, these cases represent a small fraction of cases of an estimated 57,000 Americans that are scammed daily.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) states, “There is no government-wide estimate of the money lost to scams, no common definition of scams, and no national strategy for combatting them.” The GAO identified 13 separate federal agencies that have made some efforts to counter scams. These agencies are “largely pursuing independent activities related to countering scams…these efforts are not coordinated across all the agencies we identified on a formal, government-wide basis.”16 Scammers capitalize on U.S. government mandate overlaps, limited enforcement, and an overwhelmed consumer protection system.
Tech Regulation
Moreover, the U.S. opts for a particularly hands-off approach to regulating tech companies that resemble public transportation for scams.
While many of its peers have implemented legislation and enforcement mechanisms to hold social media platforms like Facebook accountable for scams perpetrated on their platforms, the U.S. largely relies on voluntary compliance and self-regulation by tech giants. For instance, the U.K. and E.U. enacted legislation like the Online Safety Bill and Digital Services Act that respectively require tech companies to monitor and remove scam content and implement safeguards against fraudulent activities.
New Tools: The New Evolution of Scams
While U.S. government agencies, financial institutions, and consumers try to keep pace against their criminal adversaries, scammers continue to evolve.
Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency has provided scammers with a borderless and nearly anonymous payment mechanism that makes detection much more difficult. Its decentralized nature enables rapid global transfers without traditional intermediaries. With increasing regularity, scammers are requesting their scam victims to send payments via cryptocurrency.
Unfortunately, this trend coincides with the growing ease of converting U.S. Dollars into cryptocurrency. There are nearly 31,000 crypto ATMs sitting in grocery stores, smoke shops, convenience stores, and gas stations across the country.17 Banks and card issuers are also increasing their involvement in cryptocurrency.
Notably, the largest U.S. card provider, Chase, announced their partnership with Coinbase to allow Chase’s 85 million consumers direct bank linking to crypto exchanges. Erin West, a former prosecutor of crypto criminals and founder of the scam awareness-raising non-profit Operation Shamrock, responds “Our consumers are not ready for this. We’re not onboarding the people …into the future of finance–we’re sending them into a minefield without a map.”
Artificial Intelligence
AI in unlocking previously unthinkable opportunities for automation. However, scammers are benefiting from these newfound enhancements as well- making scams even harder to detect.
While legitimate contact centers are taking advantage of AI voice modulation (accent modification) tools to help offshore agents communicate with American customers, these capabilities offer wonderful opportunities for international scammers to further disguise themselves on calls with potential victims.
AI assists scammers in creating seemingly authentic websites and emails that impersonate legitimate businesses. Scammers can aggregate massive databases of public information to automate personalized scam efforts, impersonating your real contacts and patroned businesses. In some cases, they can even imitate you from public images and videos to bypass authentication systems.
While still nascent, quantum computing and its immense processing power holds the potential to even more profoundly disrupt cybersecurity and fraud prevention.
Stopping the Madness: What We Can Do
Destigmatize Victims
As scams evolve, so must our daily conversations. Scam victims are not naïve; the scam economy did not exceed $1 trillion due to gullibility. Victims are targets of a ruthless and sophisticated criminal network specifically designed to steal their money.
When scam victims can openly discuss their experiences, families and friends learn what to avoid and our financial institutions and government agencies can more accurately understand the scale of the issue. Open dialogue can only occur when social shame is eliminated.
Spread Awareness
If you were unaware of the wickedness and global scale of the scam economy, your family and friends are likely not aware either. Whether outraged by financial losses, scam victim suicides, or the massive global scale of human trafficking and modern slavery, shared awareness is required to douse the vile flames of the scam economy.
As one of the world’s most underreported, pressing, and insidious crises, Americans must decide that the scam economy is worth the attention of our friends, family, colleagues, and elected officials.
Advocate for Policy
The scam crisis merits enacting an Executive Order that acknowledges the severity of the problem, designating a government body to lead implementation, and coordinating across agencies for education, research, legislation, investigation, and prosecution.
Americans can also advocate for accountability from U.S. satellite companies that provide documented scam centers with internet access, search engines that neglect to assess and remove dangerous websites, and social media companies that allow scammers to operate on their platforms.
Change will not occur without action. If you want to contribute to the end of the scam economy, one of the most impactful actions is sharing your concerns with your Representative.
Become a Human Crime Specialist
One of the most impactful steps you can take is to become a Human Crime Specialist (HCS). This program equips you with the expertise to understand and disrupt the global machinery behind scams, human trafficking, and exploitation. By joining, you help build the coordinated response that governments and industries have yet to create, standing on the front lines of protecting people and economies from one of the most insidious criminal enterprises of our time. The next cohort launches April 2026. Enroll now at HCSProgram.com.
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