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China’s Scams Targeting Americans in Every Zip Code Must Be Stopped | Opinion

14 0
12.09.2025

The American people are under attack. The frontlines don't look like battlefields, but rather a computer screen, a phone call, or a social media message. The bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission recently completed a report that details how massive scam centers across Southeast Asia—many operated by Chinese criminal networks—are systematically robbing Americans of billions of dollars a year.

These are not one-off criminal operations. They are industrial-scale fraud factories that have turned digital deception into one of the world's most lucrative criminal enterprises—rivaling, and in some estimates surpassing, the global drug trade. According to our recent Commission findings, Americans lost over $5 billion to scams tied to these networks in 2024 alone.

The victims aren't faceless statistics. One Oklahoma couple lost more than $5 million—depleting life savings meant for retirement—while in Maryland, a single victim was bilked of over $3 million in just a few months, shattered by "pig-butchering" schemes involving false romance and crypto investments.

But these scam centers are not just........

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