The FBI said this week that Americans lost more than $17.7 billion in “cyber-enabled” scam complaints last year — likely a larger share of the real total, given that many victims don’t report their experiences. Some US officials say a major obstacle to comprehensively addressing the issue is a lack of cooperation with Chinese officials. They argue that China’s efforts to address industrial scandals are aimed at reducing the number of Chinese citizens affected rather than comprehensively halting the activity to protect all victims worldwide.
“To China’s credit, it has cracked down on these actions, but it has done so selectively, largely turning a blind eye to scam centers that prey on foreigners,” Reva Price, a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said at a Senate hearing last month. “As a result, Chinese criminal syndicates have been emboldened to target Americans.”
Beijing’s selective tactics have helped some Chinese scammers, even those operating within China, to continue operating as long as they specifically target foreigners, according to commission research published in March.
Other US-based researchers have also reached similar conclusions. From 2023 to 2024, China recorded a 30 percent decline in the amount of money lost by its citizens to scams, while the U.S. faced a more than 40 percent increase, according to congressional testimony last year from Jason Tower, who was then Myanmar country director for the U.S. Institute of Peace’s program on transnational crime and security in Southeast Asia. In response to Beijing’s enforcement dynamics, Tower said at the time, “Scam syndicates are increasingly moving to target the rest of the world and Americans in particular.”
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime noted last year that scam centers are diversifying their worker pools, moving from primarily trafficking Chinese citizens and other Chinese speakers to trafficking people from different countries and backgrounds who speak different languages. UN researchers attributed this change in part to the attackers broadening their targets to include different populations around the world. But he also said the dynamic also appears to be a response to Beijing’s efforts to enforce Chinese law enforcement and protect Chinese citizens.
“China is doing more to fight fraud than any other country,” says Gary Warner, a longtime digital scam researcher and director of intelligence at cybersecurity firm Darktower. “But I do agree that China’s crackdown on people committing fraud in China has ballooned and led to more international and US targeting.”
The Chinese government has spent years investing in national security campaigns warning citizens about the dangers of scams and how to avoid falling victim to them. Some public discourse attempts to appeal to a sense of national solidarity. There is a common meme in China, 中国文文化中国文, which literally means, “Chinese people don’t cheat Chinese people” which is used to signal trust when making restaurant recommendations or swapping job leads. In the context of digital scams, a variant has emerged: “The Chinese don’t scam the Chinese.”
<a href