China’s selective crackdown on the criminal network pushed scammers to shift targets from Chinese victims to U.S. victims, the USCC said.
Americans have become top targets of China-linked scam syndicates in Southeast Asia as Beijing’s selective crackdowns pushed criminals to target more U.S. victims, according to a congressional report published this month.
While China reported a 30 percent decrease in money lost to online scams in 2024, the United States’ loss increased by 42 percent, the U.S.—China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) said on July 18.
In one example, the report described how an 82-year-old Virginia man named Dennis befriended a “woman” named “Jessie” on Facebook. After months of chatting, “Jessie” disappeared, along with Dennis’s life savings, right after Dennis was persuaded to invest the money in cryptocurrency. Dennis took his own life.
Dennis’s story is a typical “pig butchering” scam, in which a scammer builds a personal relationship with a victim, called “fattening the pig,” before convincing them to invest in fake schemes, or “slaughtering the pig.”
These scammers, many of whom are victims of human trafficking themselves, are often imprisoned in industrial-scale scam centers run by Chinese criminal networks in Southeast Asia.
The USCC said the scam centers have “exploded into a massive criminal industry that rivals the global drug trade—including the fentanyl market—in scale and sophistication.”
According to the report, in 2023, scam centers in Burma, Cambodia, and Laos produced around $43.8 billion in revenue, about 40 percent of the countries’ combined GDP.
Government Link
Many of the industrial-scale crime centers, which fueled corruption and violence in their hosting countries, have links with elements of the Chinese regime, the committee said.
“The Chinese criminals behind scam centers have built ties—some overt, some deniable—to the Chinese government by embracing patriotic rhetoric, supporting China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and promoting pro-Beijing propaganda overseas.
“As a result, Chinese crime syndicates have expanded across Southeast Asia with, at a minimum, implicit backing from elements of the Chinese government,” the report says.
By Lily Zhou
