Americans lost more than $17.7 billion to cyber-enabled scams last year. That staggering figure from the FBI almost certainly understates the real damage, since plenty of victims never report what happened to them. But here’s the thing that should worry you more than the raw numbers: the scammers aren’t slowing down. They’re just pivoting to new targets.
The industrial-scale scamming operations running out of Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia have become so entrenched that even coordinated international law enforcement efforts haven’t managed to shut them down. These aren’t lone wolves. They’re organized networks with ties to Chinese organized crime, armies of trafficked workers forced into doing the actual scamming, and sophisticated money laundering infrastructure to move the profits around.
What’s particularly frustrating for US officials is that one potential solution keeps hitting a wall: China’s government.
The Selective Enforcement Problem
China has absolutely cracked down on scamming operations. The scale of effort is real. But here’s where it gets complicated. According to Reva Price from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, testifying at a Senate hearing last month, “China has done so selectively, largely turning a blind eye to scam centers victimizing foreigners.”
The math backs this up. From 2023 to 2024, China reported a 30 percent drop in money its own citizens lost to scams. Meanwhile, the US suffered a more than 40 percent increase in the same period, according to congressional testimony from Jason Tower, who was then the Myanmar country director for the US Institute of Peace’s Program on Transnational Crime and Security in Southeast Asia.
The pattern is clear enough that researchers have connected the dots. Beijing’s enforcement strategy, focused primarily on protecting Chinese citizens, has essentially created an incentive structure for scammers. Keep hitting foreigners, and you can keep operating. Target Chinese people, and you get shut down hard.
This isn’t conspiracy theorizing. Research published by the US-China Economic and Security Crime Commission in March found that Beijing’s selective strategy has actually emboldened Chinese scammers, even those operating inside China proper, to keep working as long as they exclusively target foreigners. The criminals have adapted to the enforcement environment they’re in.
How the Balloon Got Squeezed
Gary Warner, a longtime digital scams researcher and director of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm DarkTower, offers a useful metaphor. “China is doing more to fight fraud like orders of magnitude more than any other country,” Warner says. “But I would agree that the crackdown by China on people scamming China has squeezed the balloon so to speak and led to more international and American targeting.”
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime picked up on this dynamic last year. Scam centers have been deliberately diversifying their worker pools, shifting away from trafficking predominantly Chinese nationals and other Chinese speakers toward entrapping people from broader arrays of countries and backgrounds who speak different languages. Some of this reflects the scammers simply expanding their target markets. But researchers also noted that it seemed like a direct reaction to Chinese enforcement efforts designed to protect Chinese citizens.
Think about it from a criminal’s perspective. You’ve got a workforce. You’ve got infrastructure. You’ve got money laundering pipelines set up. If your home country’s government decides to come down hard on victimizing locals but looks the other way when you’re hitting foreigners, what do you do? You retarget. You find new languages. You build new playbooks. You keep the operation running.
The National Solidarity Angle
China has invested years in national safety campaigns warning citizens about scams and how to avoid them. Part of this messaging taps into something deeper than just crime prevention. There’s a common meme in Chinese internet culture: 中国人不骗中国人, which literally translates to “Chinese people don’t deceive Chinese people.” It’s meant to signal trust when people swap restaurant recommendations or job leads online.
In the context of digital scams, a variant has emerged: “Chinese don’t scam Chinese.”
This appeals to a kind of national solidarity. It’s not just about law enforcement. It’s about cultural messaging around what it means to be Chinese and trustworthy within that in-group. And the flipside of that in-group trust? Well, it’s easier to justify targeting the out-group.
Warner raises a fair point when he asks: “Isn’t it the goal of every country to stop fraud specifically against their citizens?” On its surface, that’s a reasonable question. Of course governments prioritize their own people. But the problem is that when one country’s enforcement strategy becomes this selective, it creates externalities that other countries have to absorb.
The Ransomware Parallel
This isn’t a unique problem. A similar dynamic has been playing out for years in ransomware, another critical area of cybercrime. The most prolific ransomware gangs tend to be based in Slavic countries, particularly Russia. And Russia has essentially offered safe harbor to cybercriminal gangs, so long as those groups don’t target Russian citizens or organizations cooperating with the Russian government.
The Kremlin periodically does selective enforcement against ransomware actors, but it’s never amounted to the comprehensive crackdown that would meaningfully address ransomware as a global threat. The pattern repeats: selective enforcement creates perverse incentives. Criminals know where the pressure points are, and they work around them.
What Actually Stops This?
Here’s where things get murky. Whatever Beijing’s intent might be, the actual result is that these criminal networks keep thriving. The scammers keep operating. Americans keep getting targeted. The money keeps flowing out of victims’ accounts into offshore networks.
The uncomfortable truth is that as long as countries can selectively enforce rules based on who’s being victimized, global business and crime problems won’t get solved comprehensively. Individual governments protect their own. International cooperation remains fragmented. And the criminals adapt.
For now, Americans should assume they’re increasingly being treated as the path of least resistance by scamming operations that can’t hit Chinese targets anymore. The targeting will probably only get more sophisticated, the pitches more personalized, the social engineering more refined. When you’ve got an organized operation with money, infrastructure, and motivation, you don’t give up. You just find new victims.
