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The US Attorney's Office in Washington and two British agencies signed a cooperation agreement on September 3 to target the Southeast Asian scam centers draining Americans of roughly $10 billion a year. The memorandum links the Justice Department's Scam Center Strike Force with the UK's National Crime Agency and Crown Prosecution Service.
US Attorney Jeanine Pirro signed the document with National Crime Agency Director General Graeme Biggar and Crown Prosecutor Stephen Parkinson at the British ambassador's residence in Washington. Under its terms, the agencies will run parallel investigations into shared targets, trade intelligence on the crime syndicates, and decide together where to bring cases.
The compounds sit mostly in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, and are run by Chinese organized crime groups. Many of the workers inside are human trafficking victims, forced to run romance and investment scams against people overseas. Pirro said the aim is to "disable the Chinese TOC networks that are operating these scam compounds."
The scale is large and still growing. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center found that cyber-enabled fraud drove almost 85 percent of all reported losses in 2025. Reported losses from cryptocurrency and investment fraud rose from $4.57 billion in 2023 to $8.65 billion in 2025, an increase of 89 percent. Officials say the real totals are higher, because most victims never file a report.
The Strike Force launched in November 2025 and now draws on the FBI, Secret Service, IRS Criminal Investigation, the Postal Inspection Service, and Homeland Security Investigations. It has asked US companies to take a more active part in protecting their users. The two sides have already found overlapping cases and plan an in-person disruption event with private sector partners in London in early October.
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