Transnational scams based out of Southeast Asia are increasingly targeting American citizens in a trend that is being “increasingly compared to fentanyl in terms of the impacts on the U.S.,” says USIP’s Jason Tower, adding that since the crime syndicates have close ties with China, we should be “pushing China on this issue to hold it accountable.”
U.S. Institute of Peace experts discuss the latest foreign policy issues from around the world in On Peace, a brief weekly collaboration with SiriusXM's POTUS Channel 124.
Transcript
Laura Coates: Joining us now is Jason Tower, the county director for the Burma program at the USIP. Good morning, Jason, glad to have you here. I want to get right to the point with the limited time we have, Southeast Asia, and especially Myanmar, have become hubs now for industrial scale scam farms. What's going on?
Jason Tower: Yeah, so really, over the past couple of years, especially since the Myanmar military coup that took place in February of 2021, you've seen where criminal groups have basically taken over vast parts of the borderlands, the border between Myanmar and Thailand in particular, and they've built out this very disturbing web of compounds where basically you have over 100,000 people in a very concentrated area that are perpetrating online scamming, targeting a global population, but increasingly targeting Americans. So this problem continues to get worse, and you've seen over the past couple of weeks that there was a new wave of human trafficking into the zones that has triggered something of a crackdown by law enforcement. But it's estimated that there's roughly $64 billion in global losses to these forms of online scamming that are concentrated in mainland, Southeast Asia.
Laura Coates: Oh my goodness, who’s it impacting? I know Americans, young and old, senior citizens, particularly vulnerable to these scams as well. Cryptocurrency is often the vehicle, I understand, for the scam, making tracing by law enforcement particularly difficult, if not impossible.
Jason Tower: That's right. I mean, you have cases in the United States where one single individual, this was a banker from Kansas, lost almost 50 million U.S. dollars to these very sophisticated forms of scams. And you're seeing where all across the U.S., particularly in states like California, states like Florida, Texas, that losses continue to pile up on the part of Americans. The scams are using cryptocurrency. They're using basically a lot of fraudulent cryptocurrency platforms that are under the control of these scam syndicates and really exploiting a lack of knowledge on the part of Americans of these new types of technologies, exploiting also the difficulty that law enforcement has tracing funds on cryptocurrency, and this is a problem both in the U.S., but also all around the region, where, you know, law enforcement in countries like Thailand and countries even like Singapore have a lot of difficulty tracing where these funds go once they've been stolen.
Laura Coates: How do you stop this then? Who's behind, some sort of method to try to counteract this or protect Americans?
Jason Tower: Well, I think part of the evolution of this is interesting, because these are crime groups from China that the Chinese police pushed out of China into Southeast Asia, and they've really taken over control of territories in conflict, afflicted states, or weak states, like Myanmar. And so, the perpetrators are actually coming from China, and you've seen where the Chinese government has cracked down on them to an extent, because previously, the scamming was largely targeting Chinese nationals. Now it's pivoting to target the rest of the world and to especially target Americans, but because China has been involved in these crackdowns, it has a lot of intelligence, a lot of information from different cell phones that have been seized from the scammers. So, I think one thing is, is really pushing China on this issue, to hold it accountable, to force it to share some of that information about losses to Americans. I mean, this is something that's being compared increasingly to fentanyl in terms of the impacts on the U.S. And there's really an angle, I think, to push to get access to this intelligence that would help us to really start going after some of the perpetrators and you know, finding ways to seize these funds, I think also what's really needed is a whole of government approach to these issues, really looking at, you know, how can you mobilize folks across the Congress to start looking at how they can keep people in their constituencies safe. How can you get law enforcement to work more closely with policymakers on this to hold those criminals accountable. So there's a lot that can be done, but this is increasingly a major threat to global and U.S. national security that's stemming from these scam centers in places like Myanmar.
Laura Coates: This is so important to have heard this information. We appreciate it so much. We shall see how the whole of government approach possibly works in this instance. Jason Tower, USIP, thank you for joining us today.
Jason Tower: Thanks for having me on.