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ETH The U.S. Treasury reveals $12.7 billion in suspicious cryptocurrency activity in Southeast Asia fraud dens
On Thursday, the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) released an analysis and alert linking approximately $12.7 billion in suspicious financial activity to cryptocurrency investment scams located in Southeast Asia campuses.
Between September 2023 and December 2025, approximately 1,300 institutions submitted 33,904 reports. Among them, money services businesses (mainly cryptocurrency companies) submitted 55% of the reports with a marked amount of US$5.5 billion; banks submitted 41% of the reports with a marked amount of US$6.4 billion; securities companies accounted for the rest, with a marked amount of US$784.5 million.
Data shows that the number of reports increased by an average of 10.9% per month, and the amount reported increased by 18%. From 590 reports worth US$485.7 million in October 2023, it increased to 2,482 reports worth US$833.5 million in December 2025. However, FinCEN warned that the increase may partly reflect the wider use of search terms in its 2023 alerts, and that totals may include double counting of transfers, attempted payments, and submitting party errors.
Surveys showed that scammers used at least 22 different digital assets, the most common being Ethereum, USDT and USDC, and rarely used fictitious tokens. Regardless of what the victim initially purchased, blockchain analysis shows that the resulting funds are almost always converted into stablecoins and almost exclusively converted to USDT, which are then transferred through decentralized financial agreements or non-U.S. exchanges. Scammers have also reused collection addresses to multiple victims many times at the same time. It is through this model that some institutions have discovered the pattern.
Regarding the situation of elderly victims, the report shows that the proportion of elderly victims is approximately 25%, while the population over the age of 60 accounts for 24.4% of the total population. As a result, FinCEN concluded that older people have neither been disproportionately victims nor suffered disproportionately. However, FBI statistics show that people over the age of 60 in the United States face fraud losses of up to US$4.8 billion in 2024. The senator cited this data when introducing the GUARD Act, which aims to provide blockchain tracking funds for local police. Victims are spread across 50 states.
These losses often come from retirement accounts, home equity lines of credit, secondary mortgages and personal loans. For example, one woman remitted nearly $640,000 from her pension fund; another lost more than $1 million in six months.
FinCEN dedicated a section in its report to discuss the risk of self-harm, pointing out that victims sometimes face the risk of psychological crisis after discovering they have been deceived, and advising them to call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Life Hotline for help.
These fraud dens are mainly located in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. The United Nations estimates that there are hundreds of thousands of staff, many of whom were lured here through false job advertisements. Interpol has warned that this pattern is rapidly spreading beyond Southeast Asia. This year, U.S. authorities seized more than $25 million in funds related to such programs.
Since 2015, FinCEN's rapid response program has intercepted $1.8 billion in funding and recovered just over $1 billion from 5,790 U.S. victims.
