Chairman Moolenaar’s Opening Statement: The Chinese-linked Scam Economy Now Raging Across Southeast Asia Is Stealing Billions From Americans

Today, Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar delivered his opening statement at the Select Committee’s hearing titled “Crime, Corruption, and Power: The Rise of CCP-linked Scam Networks Targeting Americans and Threatening U.S. Security.”  

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Good morning.

Our nation confronts one of the fastest-growing and largest financial threats facing Americans: the industrial-scale scam and fraud ecosystem fueled by China and enabled by corruption, weak governance, and illicit finance in Southeast Asia.

In 2024, Americans lost at least $10 billion to these scams. That’s $10 billion—with a B. 

These victims are our families, neighbors, and friends, and they are being ripped off by sophisticated criminal networks linked to China. These criminal organizations are perpetrating these scams with the scale, discipline, and adaptability of multinational corporations.

This morning the Select Committee released an investigative report that details how these are not isolated criminal enterprises. They are part of a distributed ecosystem of fraud, human trafficking, cybercrime, and illicit finance that has evolved into a national security challenge for the United States.

Our investigation found that, while China does not centrally direct scam compounds, the Chinese government’s deliberate failure to combat this threat has enabled their growth and global reach, increasing harm to Americans. 

For the first time, this report includes new findings exposing how a Chinese government-owned company directly contracted with a criminal organization to construct massive scam center compounds in Southeast Asia.

Make no mistake: the Chinese government has the ability to act to bring these scam center operators to justice, but it chooses not to.

China’s internal crackdowns on online gambling and domestic scam centers have pushed Chinese criminal operators out of the country and into Cambodia and Burma, where weak governance, corruption, and political protection in those countries allows the scam networks to expand. 

At the same time, China remains essential to sustaining scam centers in the broader region. Chinese-language financial systems, cryptocurrency, and money laundering networks provided the infrastructure necessary for scam proceeds to move rapidly across borders while evading scrutiny.

Our investigation also highlights another horrifying dimension of this ecosystem: forced criminality and human trafficking. Scam compounds across Cambodia, Burma, and other regional hubs rely heavily on human trafficking. Thousands of victims from across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America have been lured by false job advertisements, stripped of passports, threatened, beaten, and ordered to scam victims online.

Our investigation does not just highlight harms to American families, it also discusses the direct implications for U.S. national security.

These China-linked scam networks weaken U.S. partners by corrupting political systems, distorting economies, and eroding the rule of law. In countries where scam centers become entrenched, Chinese criminal actors gain leverage over infrastructure, political elites, and local institutions. This weakens the ability of regional governments to cooperate effectively with the United States on strategic priorities meant to defeat the CCP’s authoritarian ambitions in the region.

The Trump Administration has taken decisive action to confront these scam centers by standing up the Scam Center Strike Force led by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. In just the last few months, the Strike Force announced criminal cases against two Chinese nationals who managed a cryptocurrency investment fraud compound in Burma and seized more than $700 million in cryptocurrency.

But isolated arrests and sanctions alone will not solve this problem. Congress must respond with urgency.

First, we must pass the Dismantle Foreign Scam Syndicates Act. This bipartisan legislation led by Representative Jefferson Shreve passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee last September. As a lead co-sponsor, I encourage all our committee members to join the growing list of more than 60 Republicans and Democrats supporting the bill.

Second, we should prioritize China-linked scam centers as a cross-cutting national security problem. This threat overlaps cybercrime, corruption, human trafficking, illicit finance, and America’s strategic interests. It simply cannot be reduced to a single category.

The Chinese-linked scam economy is stealing billions from Americans, trafficking vulnerable people into forced criminality, corrupting strategic regions, and undermining American security and prosperity.

We must act now.