Governments around the world have been struggling to address the rise of industrial-scale scamming operations based in countries like Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia that have cost victims billions of dollars over the past few years. The operations often have ties to Chinese organized crime, use forced labor to carry out the actual scamming, and rely on vast money laundering networks to collect a profit. They have become so widespread and ingrained in the region that even major international law enforcement collaborations targeting individual scam centers or kingpins haven’t been able to stem the tide.

The FBI said this week that “cyber-enabled” scam complaints from Americans totaled more than $17.7 billion in reported losses last year—likely a major undercount of the real total, given that many victims don’t report their experiences. Some US officials say that a major barrier to comprehensively addressing the issue is the lack of collaboration with Chinese authorities. China’s efforts to address industrial scamming, they argue, appear aimed at reducing the number of Chinese citizens being impacted rather than comprehensively stopping the activity to protect all victims around the world.

“To its credit, China has cracked down on these operations, but it has done so selectively, largely turning a blind eye to scam centers victimizing foreigners,” Reva Price, a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said at a Senate hearing last month. “As a result, the Chinese criminal syndicates have been incentivized to shift toward targeting Americans.”

According to research the commission published in March, Beijing’s selective strategy has helped embolden some Chinese scammers, even those working within China, to continue operating so long as they exclusively target foreigners.

Other US-based researchers have come to similar conclusions. From 2023 to 2024, China reported a 30 percent decrease in the amount of money its citizens lost to scams, while the US suffered a more than 40 percent increase, according to congressional testimony last year by Jason Tower, who was then the Myanmar country director for the US 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, “the scam syndicates are increasingly pivoting to target the rest of the world, and especially Americans.”

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime noted last year that scam centers have been diversifying their worker pools, shifting from predominantly trafficking Chinese nationals and other Chinese speakers to entrapping people from a broader array of countries and backgrounds who speak various languages. UN researchers attributed this change in part to attackers broadening their targets to include different populations around the world. But they added that the dynamic also seemed to be a reaction to Chinese enforcement and Beijing’s efforts to protect Chinese citizens.

“China is doing more to fight fraud—like orders of magnitude more—than any other country,” says Gary Warner, a longtime digital scams researcher and director of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm DarkTower. “But I would agree that the crackdown by China on people scamming China has squeezed the balloon so to speak and led to more international and American targeting.”

The Chinese government has spent years investing in national safety campaigns warning citizens about the threat of scams and how to avoid falling victim to them. Some of the public discourse attempts to appeal to a sense of national solidarity. There’s a common meme in China, 中国人不骗中国人, literally, “Chinese people don’t deceive Chinese people” that is used to signal trust when swapping restaurant recommendations or job leads. In the context of digital scams, a variant has emerged: “Chinese don’t scam Chinese.”

As DarkTower’s Warner puts it, “Isn't it the goal of every country to stop fraud specifically against their citizens?” And even if China’s anti-scam enforcement across Southeast Asia has been strategically selective, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Beijing is seeking to condone the scamming of victims abroad. But whatever the intent, the result is the same: These criminal networks are continuing to thrive.

A similar situation has been unfolding for years in another critical area of cybercrime: ransomware. The fact that some of the most prolific ransomware gangs are based in Slavic countries, particularly Russia, has consistently been a barrier for global law enforcement, because Russia has offered cybercriminal gangs safe harbor so long as the groups do not target Russian citizens or organizations willing to cooperate with the Russian government. The Kremlin has periodically done selective enforcement against ransomware actors, but it has never amounted to the comprehensive crackdown that would be required to meaningfully address ransomware as a global threat.

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.