Meta, Microsoft, DOJ, and Others Disrupt Southeast Asia Scam Compounds
The federal government and private sector IT companies are continuing to disrupt cybercrime operations that are targeting victims in the United States and elsewhere with investment and cryptocurrency scams.
U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) officials this week detailed a sprawling international initiative last month that included tech firms like Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Coinbase and law enforcement agencies from Thailand, Canada, Australia, and the U.K. and that targeted schemes being run out of scam compounds in Southeast Asia.
According to the DOJ, U.S. government agencies shared information with private companies – which also included Silent Push, SpaceX, TRM Labs, and Zenlayer – that led to the freezing of more than $3.8 million in cryptocurrency used in operation to launder funds stolen from Americans.
The operation, led by the DOJ’s seven-month-old Scam Center Strike Force, also resulted in the disruption of criminal activity across more than 1.4 million social media and email accounts, the interruption of malicious IP address traffic and network connections run by the scammers, the shutting down of servers, colocation facilities, and hosting infrastructure used by the scam networks in Southeast Asia, and the identification of scammers and scam platforms that law enforcement can follow up on.
1.4 Million Online Assets Disrupted
In addition, Meta executives said the 1.4 million online assets disrupted included accounts, pages, and groups across Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram along with 20,000 Microsoft accounts and thousands of Starlink kits. In addition, Thai police arrested 63 people involved in the scam operations and nine scam compounds were shut down.
“The joint operation announced today – which included the removal of mover a million accounts, the freezing of assets, and more than 60 arrests – demonstrates the power of partnerships to combat scammers,” Chris Sonderby, vice president and deputy general counsel for Meta, said in a statement.
Steven Masada, global head of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, said that “operations like this show what’s possible when technology companies and law enforcement work side by side. Scam networks operate across platforms and borders, and Microsoft remains committed to working with partner to combine visibility into scam infrastructure with real-world action, disrupting criminal networks at scale and holding those behind them accountable.”
A Global Problem
Such online scams – including investment and romance scams, often referred to as “pig-butchering” schemes – have been a problem for years, but have become a growing concern over the past several years as such operations have become taken over by organization criminal networks out of China and industrialized in compounds long Thailand’s borders with neighbors like Laos and Myanmar.
The operators lure people from the region through fake job offers and similar schemes and entrap them in the compounds, essentially creating a workforce of slaves that are force to run the scams under the threat of punishment or death.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) says investments scams in 2023 became the most commonly reported crime in 2023 and that losses to such operations rose from $3.96 billion that year to more than $7.2 billion in 2025.
In a study released in March, Interpol wrote that global losses to financial fraud last year reached $442 billion, and that scam compounds that use hundreds of thousands of people have expanded beyond Southeast Asia to multiple sites around the world. Fraud also increasingly is being enabled by AI. Some good news is that collaboration among global law enforcements agencies is growing more effective, according to Interpol.
That can be seen in the most recent DOJ announcement as well as previous operations, such as a similar one in April that led to 276 people being arrested in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
An International Response Needed
Assistant Attorney General Tysen Duva, who is part of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, said such law global law enforcement actions are needed to deal with the scam threats.
“America is facing an unprecedented threat from industrial-scale, foreign organizations looking to prey on our citizens,” Duva said in a statement. “And unprecedented problems call for novel, bold solutions.”
The Scam Center Strike Force brought together foreign government officials and representatives from the private sector during a series of in-person meetings in Washington DC from May 18 to May 21. Federal agencies like the FBI, the Secret Service, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations gave information to the private sector representatives about specific targets in Southeast Asia, helping them identify infrastructure used in the scam operations.
The companies took the information, combined it with their own, and worked with each other to identify and disrupt scam operators who were violating the firms’ terms of service. The DOJ called out Meta’s participation, said the company “played a key role in coordinating the event and encouraging broad private sector participation to maximize scam compound disruption.”
