The US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has published an alert and an analysis linking nearly $13 billion in suspected illicit activity to digital-asset investment scams operated by overseas “scam centers,” and is urging financial institutions to be vigilant and report suspicious transactions. The action, dated September 3, is the latest in a Treasury campaign against fraud targeting Americans.
The scams, known variously as “pig butchering,” “romance baiting” or “cryptocurrency confidence schemes,” use fake personas and social-engineering tactics to manipulate victims, often American, into moving money into fraudulent crypto investments. FinCEN said they are largely run by transnational criminal organizations based in Southeast Asia that operate “industrial-scale scam compounds.”
What FinCEN found
Drawing on Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) filings, FinCEN said in its Financial Trend Analysis that it examined 33,904 reports of suspected digital-asset investment scam activity submitted between September 8, 2023 and December 31, 2025, representing approximately $12.7 billion in related financial activity. An important distinction: that figure reflects activity that banks and other institutions flagged as suspicious in their reporting, not a confirmed tally of victim losses. FinCEN said targets spanned all ages, across all 50 states and several US territories.
The tactics described are familiar but effective: scammers adopt assumed names and identities to pose as romantic partners, new friends or business contacts, and build fake websites and mobile apps that imitate legitimate investment platforms. “Digital asset investment scams pose one of the most significant fraud threats facing Americans today,” said Gene Lange, who is performing the duties of Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, adding that the criminal organizations behind them “exploit both emerging technologies and human vulnerabilities.”
The crypto laundering machine
For a crypto audience, the most notable part of FinCEN’s analysis is how the money moves. The accompanying alert described a professionalized underground economy supporting the scams: “guarantee marketplaces,” online markets where scam operators buy illicit services such as account creation, phishing and money laundering, and dedicated professional money launderers who set up financial accounts and shell companies to move funds.
Critically, FinCEN singled out how proceeds re-enter the financial system: professional launderers integrate scam money through networks of money mules and, notably, through stablecoin transfers to digital-asset exchanges outside the United States. That detail underscores a recurring theme in crypto-crime enforcement; dollar-pegged stablecoins have become a favored settlement rail for illicit cross-border flows, even as their issuers and exchanges have increasingly cooperated to freeze tainted funds.
Industrial-scale scam compounds
FinCEN’s reference to “scam compounds” points to one of the darkest dimensions of this fraud. As The Crypto Times has reported in depth, many of these operations in Southeast Asia, in parts of Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, run dormitory-style compounds staffed in significant part by trafficked workers coerced into running the schemes, sometimes held against their will and moved between sites if they resist.
In other words, there are victims on both ends: those abroad who lose their savings, and those inside the compounds. Blockchain-analytics firm Chainalysis and others have described pig butchering as a transnational model that fuses human trafficking, money laundering and crypto fraud into a single industrialized business.
Part of a widening crackdown
The FinCEN action fits into a broader escalation. It explicitly ties to Executive Order 14390, “Combatting Cybercrime, Fraud, and Predatory Schemes Against American Citizens,” and follows a run of high-profile enforcement moves that The Crypto Times has chronicled through 2026.
US authorities established a Scam Center Strike Force in 2025, involving the DOJ, FBI, and Secret Service, to pursue Southeast Asian crypto-fraud networks, and in October 2025 announced a roughly $15 billion Bitcoin forfeiture (about 127,271 BTC) tied to Cambodia’s Prince Group and its indicted chairman, Chen Zhi. On the private-sector side, exchanges and stablecoin issuers including Tether have repeatedly worked with investigators to trace and freeze scam proceeds, leveraging blockchain’s transparency to intervene at the cash-out stage.
That enforcement drive has not been frictionless, however. As The Crypto Times has separately examined, the record Prince Group seizure has faced questions over how victims will be made whole, with many restitution claims reportedly rejected, a reminder that seizing scam proceeds and returning them to victims are two very different challenges.
Context on the numbers
FinCEN’s $12.7 billion figure should be read alongside, but not confused with, other estimates. It reflects suspected activity in US bank filings over roughly 27 months. By comparison, Chainalysis’ 2026 Crypto Crime Report estimated that crypto scams and fraud caused a record of more than $17 billion in losses globally in 2025 alone, with impersonation tactics and AI enablement surging — a trend The Crypto Times covered in its report on how scams increasingly target older investors.
The two figures are measured differently, but both point the same way: digital-asset investment fraud is large, growing and increasingly professionalized.
What FinCEN is asking for
The alert lists red-flag indicators to help banks, money-services businesses and other institutions detect and report activity linked to scam centers, and FinCEN emphasized that BSA reporting is essential to law-enforcement investigations and victim recovery. It encouraged institutions to share information voluntarily under Section 314(b) of the USA PATRIOT Act, which provides a liability safe harbor, and pointed to its Rapid Response Program for coordinating with foreign financial-intelligence units to try to halt and repatriate fraudulent transfers.
Victims of cyber-enabled fraud, FinCEN said, should contact their financial institution immediately and file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) or the nearest US Secret Service field office.
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