In a coordinated virtual press briefing Friday that connected U.S. officials in Washington to reporters across Southeast Asia, the Trump administration unveiled a broad enforcement action against sprawling cross-border cyber scam operations based in the region, framing the campaign as a new front in the fight against transnational Chinese organized crime.
Leading the multi-agency effort is the newly established U.S. government Scam Center Strike Force, a specialized task force assembled from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the U.S. Secret Service. The action carries sweeping penalties: the U.S. Treasury Department has imposed sanctions on 29 individuals and entities, headlined by Kok An, a sitting Cambodian senator and high-profile business leader branded the “scam center kingpin” by U.S. authorities. Two Chinese nationals also face federal criminal charges in connection with a parallel scam operation based in Myanmar.
As part of the enforcement, U.S. officials have secured a warrant to seize and shut down a major online recruitment channel hosted on the Telegram messaging platform, which the criminal networks used to lure new workers and victims. They have also moved to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds linked to the schemes, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro confirmed during the briefing.
For years, United Nations analysts and independent experts have warned that transnational cybercrime has grown rapidly across Southeast Asia, with unregulated hubs in Cambodia and Myanmar emerging as the epicenters of global scam operations that generate billions in illegal profit annually. New FBI data underscores the scale of harm to U.S. consumers: in 2025 alone, American victims lost nearly $21 billion to cyber-enabled fraud and online scams tied to these regional networks.
Beyond financial fraud, the illegal scam industry is deeply intertwined with systemic human trafficking and modern slavery, investigators say. Criminal groups recruit foreign workers with false promises of legitimate, well-paying jobs, then force them to operate romance scams and cryptocurrency fraud schemes under exploitative, near-slave labor conditions.
Under the sanctions announced Friday, all of Kok An’s assets located within U.S. jurisdiction are immediately frozen, and any U.S.-registered individual or entity is prohibited from engaging in financial or commercial transactions with him. The Associated Press was unable to reach Kok An or his legal representatives for a response to the allegations. Chea Thyrith, a spokesperson for the Cambodian Senate, noted that as an elected senator, Kok An holds parliamentary immunity, and declined further comment on the U.S. action, saying only that Washington could speak to the details of the sanctions.
This is not the first time the U.S. has targeted a sitting Cambodian senator with cyber scam-related sanctions. In 2024, the U.S. imposed similar penalties on another prominent Cambodian tycoon, Ly Yong Phat, who was also accused of ties to forced labor, human trafficking, and large-scale online fraud operations.
Pirro explained that the current crackdown grew out of a breakthrough investigation launched last November, when FBI agents deployed to Thailand gained access to a large cache of evidence seized from an abandoned scam compound in Myanmar. The trove included more than 8,000 mobile phones and 1,500 computers containing records of the network’s activities, which led investigators to the two charged Chinese nationals: Huang Xing Shan and Jiang Wen Jie.
According to court documents, Huang and Jiang worked as senior managers of the Myanmar scam compound before fleeing to Cambodia in an attempt to reestablish their fraudulent operations. The pair is currently in custody of Thai authorities facing immigration violations, and the U.S. has formally filed extradition requests to bring them to the U.S. to face charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
In response to growing international pressure, the Cambodian government has taken recent steps to crack down on domestic scam operations. In March, the country’s National Assembly unanimously passed a new anti-scam law that allows for life prison sentences for convicted operators, and the government pledged to shut down all illegal scam centers across the country by the end of April. Earlier this year, Cambodia extradited alleged Chinese scam kingpin Chen Zhi, founder of the large business and banking conglomerate Prince Holding Group, to China, even after U.S. authorities had sought his custody following a 2024 indictment accusing Chen of running a multi-billion dollar scam operation.