The US Treasury has published an analysis of $12.7 billion in suspicious financial activity tied to crypto investment scams run from compounds in Southeast Asia. The data covers September 2023 through December 2025 and draws on 33,904 reports filed by nearly 1,300 financial institutions. At the same time, the US and the UK announced a joint alliance against these operations.
What the FinCEN analysis found
The Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) published an alert and analysis of suspicious activity tied to crypto investment fraud on September 3. Industry jargon calls these schemes "pig butchering". Scammers spend months, sometimes years, building trust with a victim before pitching an "investment" and draining the funds all at once.
"These are sophisticated fraud operations that manipulate victims, who are often American."
- FinCEN, from a post on X, September 3, 2026
The figures rest on 33,904 suspicious activity reports filed by roughly 1,300 institutions. Crypto firms filed these reports most often of any sector. FinCEN cautioned that the totals should not be read as a precise damage count. The same transaction, an attempted transfer, or a filer error can end up counted across several reports.
Who filed the reports and for how much
Digital asset money services businesses filed 55% of all reports and flagged $5.5 billion in suspicious transactions. Banks filed 41% of reports but for a larger sum, $6.4 billion. Securities firms made up the rest, at $784.5 million.
Divided across all reports, the average suspicious transaction comes out to roughly $374,600. Divided across filing institutions, that is about $9.8 million per institution over the whole period. Those averages confirm this is not a story about small-dollar scams, but about operations with real individual financial weight.
Crypto firms leading on report count has a simple explanation. Wallets and exchanges are the first to see suspicious movement, before the money ever reaches a bank or cashes out to fiat. Banks tend to catch the larger, consolidated sums once funds re-enter the traditional financial system.
Which assets absorbed the stolen funds
Scammers used at least 22 different digital assets and rarely bothered with invented tokens. Victims most often first bought Ethereum, USDT, or USDC. Blockchain analysis showed proceeds were then nearly always swapped into USDT and pushed through DeFi protocols or exchanges outside the US. The choice of that particular stablecoin is no accident. Deep liquidity and a wide network of off-ramps make USDT a convenient tool for blurring the money trail quickly.
One pattern repeated across cases. Scammers reused the same collection addresses for multiple victims at once, and that pattern is how analytics firms managed to link dozens of seemingly separate cases into a single network.
Who the victims were and where the money came from
Filings grew by an average of 10.9% a month, and reported sums by 18%. October 2023 saw 590 reports worth $485.7 million; by December 2025 that had grown to 2,482 reports worth $833.5 million. Part of this climb, FinCEN itself notes, may reflect wider adoption of the terminology from its 2023 alert among financial institutions rather than actual growth in fraud.
Victims spanned all 50 states, without exception. The money for these "investments" rarely came from spare savings.
- Retirement accounts
- Home equity lines of credit
- Second mortgages
- Personal loans
One woman sent scammers nearly $640,000 from her retirement fund. Another lost more than $1 million over six months. The FBI counted $4.8 billion in fraud losses among Americans over 60 in 2024. Senators cited that figure when introducing the GUARD Act, a bill meant to fund blockchain tracing tools for local police. FinCEN separately warned institutions that some victims face a mental health crisis after discovering the fraud and advised directing them toward crisis support lines.
Where the compounds operate and why the model is spreading
Most compounds sit in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. The United Nations estimates hundreds of thousands of people work there, many lured in through fake job ads promising work abroad. In practice, this is forced labor on a scale that outstrips what any single country can handle alone. Even a successful raid on one compound does not guarantee a drop in total activity as long as that labor pool remains available.
Interpol warns the compound model is already spreading beyond Southeast Asia into new regions. US authorities seized more than $25 million tied to these schemes this year alone, a sum that is notable but small next to the total flow of funds.
What the US and the UK are doing
Alongside the FinCEN report, the US and the UK announced a joint alliance against scam compounds. The agreement covers parallel investigations and information sharing between agencies in both countries. In October, the partners plan a private-sector disruption operation in London aimed at dismantling the infrastructure behind these schemes.
FinCEN's Rapid Response Program has run since 2015. Over that period it has interdicted $1.8 billion and recovered just over $1 billion for 5,790 American victims. Set against $12.7 billion tracked in just the last two and a half years, that sum looks modest and shows how hard it is for law enforcement to keep pace with the scheme's growth. The new alliance is meant to speed up exactly that part of the fight. The goal is not so much catching organizers as cutting off their cash-out channels faster.
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