Reported by JACOB SIMS, ERIN WEST and JASON TOWER

(Excerpt shared below. To read full report and announcement, go to: https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/technology/5565543-congress-targets-foreign-scam-syndicates/amp/ and https://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/dem/release/ranking-member-shaheen-senator-cornyn-introduce-bill-to-counter-foreign-cyber-scams)

Last year, Americans lost over $10 billion dollars to sophisticated online scamming operations run out of Southeast Asia. Last week, the Department of Justice seized $15 billion in Bitcoin from the Cambodia-based “forced labor scam compound,” Prince Holding Group.  

These aren’t opportunistic internet cons. They are industrial fraud factories — fortified compounds run by China-originated transnational crime syndicates, protected by corrupt officials and the formal institutions they control and powered by the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of human trafficking victims lured from nearly 80 countries. And they are now one of the largest forms of financial crime hitting Americans.

Congress is finally drawing a line. A bipartisan bill in the Senate, a bipartisan endorsed State Department Reauthorization amendment and a related stand-alone bill in the House all explicitly name this phenomenon for what it is: a critical threat to U.S. national security.

The urgency could not be clearer. Scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos have metastasized into sprawling criminal empires, running crypto fraud, romance scam, online gambling, money laundering and even child-sextortion rackets at an unprecedented scale. 

They target Americans deliberately: Our bank accounts are attractive targets, our cyber defenses are weak and Beijing has proven happy to look the other way, so long as the victims aren’t Chinese.