ASEAN Beat | Security | Southeast Asia

US Congressmen Call for Tougher Actions Against Key Southeast Asian Scam Enablers

Brian Mast (R-FL) and John Moolenaar (R-MI) have requested probes into 28 people and entities allegedly connected to scam gangs in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar.

Two leading U.S. congressmen have called on the Trump administration to undertake further investigations into Southeast Asia’s scam industry, claiming that government-led crackdowns are leaving many important enablers untouched.

The request was conveyed in a letter by Brian Mast (R-FL), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and John Moolenaar (R-MI), chairman of the Select Committee on China, dated Tuesday. In the letter, which was addressed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, the pair requested further actions to combat scam operations in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar.

In particular, Mast and Moolenaar requested a probe of 28 individuals and entities who have been accused of involvement in online scamming operations in the three nations, asking for a determination within 180 days as to whether they “meet the statutory criteria for imposition of sanctions” under U.S. law. The list includes businesspeople and government officials, including two sitting Cambodian ministers.

“Americans are being scammed online at enormous and still growing rates, due primarily to a network of Chinese transnational criminal organizations based in Southeast Asia,” the two congressmen wrote. “These sanctions investigations would significantly degrade the financial, business, and political structures in Southeast Asia complicit in online scams that have scammed Americans out of tens of billions of dollars annually.”

Online scamming operations have proliferated across mainland Southeast Asia since the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in loosely regulated parts of Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. Coordinated predominantly by Chinese organized crime syndicates, these industrial-scale scam operations run romance-investment and crypto scams that target victims across the globe.

In addition to victimizing those on the receiving end of the scams, these operations rely on a large, indentured workforce – mostly ordinary people who have been trafficked or lured under false pretenses and held against their will. Inside scam centers, victims have reported being confined in cell-like rooms and subjected to beatings, mistreatment, and torture.

The Congressional request comes after a year in which authorities in Myanmar and Cambodia, under growing outside pressure, particularly from the United States and China, have launched well-publicized crackdowns on scam operations.

These have supposedly led to the demolition of the massive KK Park and Shwe Kokko scam hubs in Myanmar’s Karen State, and the eradication of online scam compounds in Cambodia – at least if Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, who heads the government’s ad hoc Commission for Combating Online Scams, is to be believed.

Whether these crackdowns have gone far enough remains, however, a very open question. A report released yesterday by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute highlighted the extent to which transnational crime and formal structures of governance have become interleaved.

According to the report, which was authored by Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard University and columnist for The Diplomat who specializes in Southeast Asia’s scam economy, wrote that by early 2026, scamming operations “had become a massive source of income for........

© The Diplomat