The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FCEN), which is under the U.S. Department of the Treasury ( FinCEN ), released an analysis and warning stating that from September 2023 to December 2025, approximately $12.7 billion in suspicious financial activities were related to crypto investment scams operated by Southeast Asian entities. The conclusions are based on 33,904 reports of suspicious activities submitted by around 1,300 institutions across the United States.
Declaration amount rises to $12.7 billion
According to FinCEN, the relevant declarations mainly come from monetary service institutions, banks, and securities firms. Among them, monetary service institutions make the most declarations, with the vast majority being cryptocurrency companies; banks, on the other hand, report the highest amounts.
- Financial service institutions submitted approximately 55% of the reports, involving $5.5 billion.
- Banks submitted approximately 41% of the reports, involving $6.4 billion.
- Securities institutions are involved in approximately $784.5 million.
The report shows that the number and amount of such declarations continued to increase during the statistical period. In October 2023, there were 590 reports involving $485.7 million; by December 2025, this had increased to 2,482 reports involving $833.5 million.
FinCEN It should also be noted that the increase may be related to institutions adopting their search terms more widely, and there may be issues such as double counting, failed transfers, and reporting errors in the statistics.
Most funds flow towards USDT
According to FinCEN, the fraud gang used at least 22 types of digital assets, with the most common ones being ETH, USDT, and USDC. They rarely used self-created tokens. On-chain analysis shows that regardless of the assets the victims initially purchased, the proceeds from fraud were usually quickly converted into stablecoins, and almost all of it flowed into USDT.
These funds were subsequently transferred through exchanges outside the United States or via the DeFi protocol. The report also mentioned that the fraudsters reused payment addresses among multiple victims, which is an important clue for some institutions to identify this pattern.
Victims are spread across all 50 states of the United States.
FinCEN indicates that approximately 25% of the reports involve elderly people being victims, which is close to the 24.4% proportion of the US population aged 60 and above. Therefore, the elderly group does not show a significantly higher rate of victimization in such scams.
However, the sources of the funds that are victimized are often directly related to individuals' long-term savings, including pension accounts, home equity lines of credit, second mortgages, and personal loans. The cases listed in the report show that one woman transferred nearly $640,000 from her pension, while another victim lost over $1 million within six months.
The parks are concentrated in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar.
According to FinCEN, such fraud parks are mainly distributed in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. The United Nations previously estimated that these parks involve hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom were deceived or even trafficked to engage in fraud activities through false job advertisements. Interpol has also warned that this model is spreading to regions outside Southeast Asia.
Additional information:U.S. law enforcement agencies have seized over $25 million in assets related to such scams this year. FinCEN also stated that since the launch of the rapid response program in 2015, $1.8 billion in funds have been intercepted, and over $1 billion has been recovered for 5,790 American victims.
