TL;DR
- FinCEN linked $12.7 billion in suspicious activity to crypto investment scams operated from Southeast Asian compounds.
- Around 1,300 institutions filed 33,904 reports between September 2023 and December 2025, with monthly sums growing an average of 18%.
- Victims span all 50 U.S. states, and the frauds were financed with retirement funds, mortgages, and personal loans.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, published an analysis linking approximately $12.7 billion in suspicious financial activity to investment scams in cryptocurrencies operated from compounds in Southeast Asia.
FinCEN processed 33,904 suspicious activity reports filed by around 1,300 institutions between September 2023 and December 2025.
Money services businesses, mostly crypto firms, accounted for 55% of the reports, covering roughly $5.5 billion. Banks contributed 41% of the filings and reported the highest amounts, at $6.4 billion. Securities firms rounded out the picture with $784.5 million.
The monthly volume of reports grew an average of 10.9%, while the declared sums climbed 18%, rising from 590 reports totaling $485.7 million in October 2023 to 2,482 reports totaling $833.5 million in December 2025.
FinCEN Identifies Patterns in the Schemes
The scammers used at least 22 different digital assets: Ethereum, USDT, and USDC were the most common. On-chain analysis revealed that, regardless of the asset acquired by the victim, funds were converted almost invariably to stablecoins, and almost exclusively to USDT, before moving through DeFi protocols or exchanges outside the U.S. The reuse of collection addresses across multiple simultaneous victims was the signal that allowed several institutions to identify the pattern.
The Scammers’ Preferred Victims
A striking piece of data contradicted a widespread perception: scams targeting older adults appeared in around 25% of the reports, a proportion that aligns with the 24.4% share of the U.S. population aged 60 or older. FinCEN concluded that this group is not victimized disproportionately. Losses were financed through retirement accounts, home equity lines of credit, second mortgages, and personal loans. One woman sent nearly $640,000 from her retirement fund; another lost more than $1 million in six months.
The compounds operate primarily in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, and are staffed by personnel the UN estimates at hundreds of thousands of people, many of them victims of human trafficking recruited through false job offers.
Interpol warned that the model is expanding beyond Southeast Asia. U.S. authorities seized more than $25 million linked to these schemes in the past year alone. Since 2015, FinCEN’s Rapid Response Program has intercepted $1.8 billion and recovered just over $1 billion for 5,790 American victims.
