Americans receive roughly 4 billion robocalls a month — and nearly five times as many scam texts. The threat is escalating faster than enforcement can keep pace, and the financial damage is staggering. According to the FBI, international scammers stole $20 billion from U.S. citizens in 2025 alone.
The scale of the problem has drawn action on Capitol Hill.
This past week, the Joint Economic Committee called on telecommunications companies to strengthen their scam-identification efforts and “take further steps” to protect consumers, pressing the industry to shoulder more of the burden that currently falls on everyday Americans.
But the trail leads well beyond domestic phone lines. At the same time, the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party released findings on scam call-centers operating out of Southeast Asia — what investigators describe as a “broad network of fraud, human trafficking, cybercrime, and illicit finance.” The operations are not the work of lone actors, but a sprawling criminal ecosystem run out of compounds across the region.
The Select Committee’s report details the grim specifics of how these compounds function.
Scammers recruit trafficked workers — often lured by false job offers — to run their operations, and the report documents specific instances of abuse inside the criminal compounds. To move their profits, the network relies on lesser-monitored financial avenues, laundering proceeds through shell companies and cryptocurrencies.
That illicit capital doesn’t stay contained.
As the Committee’s report notes, the enormous volumes of money generated through these scams are funneled “through global financial systems, including U.S.-linked institutions, crypto, and offshore jurisdictions” — collapsing the line between foreign and domestic threats.
What allows the machine to keep running, the Committee found, is Beijing’s complicity.
In a hearing before the panel, witnesses testified that China applies “selective enforcement,” choosing to prosecute scammers only when the victims are Chinese while tacitly allowing the same operators to target geopolitical rivals like the United States.
Chairman John Moolenaar put it bluntly: “Make no mistake: the Chinese Government has the ability to act to bring these scam center operators to justice, but it chooses not to.”
Watch a clip from the recent hearing below:
From Massachusetts to Wisconsin, Americans are losing billions, while China-linked scam compounds overseas operate with impunity.@OpShamrock's Erin West calls it a “scamdemic," and she’s right.
This is bigger than fraud it’s a coordinated, global threat. pic.twitter.com/wkK6hR4Tm9
— Select Committee on China (@ChinaSelect) May 19, 2026
