U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro on Wednesday announced that the Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force busted an illicit Chinese marketplace wide open.
During a press conference, Pirro said these marketplaces that are run by transnational criminal organizations “are stealing, conning, and scamming Americans out of their life savings.”
She said the DOJ has “made enormous strides in fighting a previously unknown and unidentified network of overseas criminals who are focused on us and our money.”
Pirro further explained that these groups use U.S. platforms, banks, and victims as the product and characterized it as “a generational wealth transfer from Main Street America to Chinese organized crime.”
“And they are staffed with human trafficked labor,” she continued. “These are not basement scammers. These are factories. They are compounds that have quotas, shifts. They beat the people working there, and they even have balance sheets.”
Now, President Trump made this a priority in March of 2026 when he signed an executive order making it clear that he wanted to combat cybercrime and fraud and predatory schemes against American citizens, and he has given us the ability and the resources that we need to fight this particular kind of blight. And if you don’t think this affects you, a little primer: seven out of 10 adults globally have encountered a scam one way or another. They are repeatedly trying to rip you off. They are in Southeast Asia, and there are hundreds of, as I said, industrial-scale scam compounds. And the estimates put their earnings at about $40 billion a year.