China Is Cracking Down on Scams. Just Not the Ones Hitting Americans
Governments around The world is struggling to cope with the rise of industrial-scale scam operations based in countries like Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia, which have cost victims billions of dollars in recent years. The operations often have ties to Chinese organized crime, use forced labor to carry out the scams and rely on vast money laundering networks to reap profits. They have become so widespread and entrenched in the region that even large international law enforcement collaborations targeting individual scam centers or kingpins have not been able to stem the tide.
The FBI said this week that “cyber-enabled” scam complaints filed by Americans totaled more than $17.7 billion in reported losses last year — likely a significant underestimate of the true total, given that many victims do not report their experiences. Some U.S. officials say the lack of collaboration with Chinese authorities poses a major obstacle to a comprehensive resolution of this problem. China’s efforts to combat industrial fraud, they argue, appear aimed at reducing the number of Chinese citizens affected rather than stopping the activity altogether in order to protect all victims around the world.
“To its credit, China has cracked down on these operations, but it has done so selectively, largely turning a blind eye to scam hubs that victimize foreigners,” Reva Price, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said at a Senate hearing last month. “As a result, Chinese criminal syndicates have been incentivized to target Americans. »
According to a study released by the commission in March, Beijing’s selective strategy has helped encourage some Chinese scammers, even those working in China, to continue operating as long as they exclusively target foreigners.
Other US-based researchers have reached similar conclusions. From 2023 to 2024, China reported a 30% decrease in the amount of money its citizens lost to scams, while the United States suffered an increase of more than 40%, according to congressional testimony last year by Jason Tower, who was then the Myanmar country director for the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Program on Transnational Crime and Security in Southeast Asia. In response to Beijing’s law enforcement drive, Tower said at the time, “the scam syndicates are increasingly turning their attention to the rest of the world, and particularly Americans.”
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime noted last year that scam hubs were diversifying their worker pools, moving from trafficking primarily Chinese nationals and other Chinese speakers to ensnaring people from a wider range of countries and backgrounds and speaking different languages. U.N. researchers attributed the shift in part to attackers broadening their targets to include different populations around the world. But they added that this dynamic also appeared to be a reaction to Chinese measures and Beijing’s efforts to protect Chinese citizens.
“China is doing more to combat fraud – orders of magnitude more – than any other country,” says Gary Warner, a longtime researcher on digital scams and director of intelligence at cybersecurity firm DarkTower. “But I agree that China’s crackdown on people defrauding China has pretty much lowered the ball and led to more international and U.S. targeting.”
The Chinese government has spent years investing in national security campaigns to warn citizens about the threat of scams and how to avoid falling victim to them. Part of the public discourse attempts to appeal to a feeling of national solidarity. There is a common meme in China, 中国人不骗中国人, literally “Chinese don’t cheat Chinese” that is used to signal trust when exchanging restaurant recommendations or job leads. In the context of digital scams, a variation has emerged: “The Chinese do not scam the Chinese.”
