▶ 0:00:14Well, good morning. The Select Committee will come to order. And I want to thank everyone for coming today. I know the House schedule has changed and so we don't have session today. But Representative Khanna and I felt that this topic is so important that we want to continue and have this hearing And really appreciate our witnesses being with us today.
▶ 0:00:39I know some of you canceled family vacations, came in from Thailand, all over uh and we are very grateful, but uh you know, our nation confronts one of the fastest-growing and largest financial threats facing The industrial-scale scam and fraud ecosystem fueled by China and enabled by corruption, weak governance, and illicit finance in Southeast Asia.
▶ 0:01:07In 2024, Americans lost at least $10 billion to these scams. That's 10 billion with a B. These victims are our families, neighbors, and friends, and they are being ripped off by sophisticated criminal networks linked to China. These criminal organizations are perpetrating these scams with the scale, discipline, and adaptability of multinational corporations.
▶ 0:01:36This morning, the Select Committee released an investigative report that details how these are not isolated criminal enterprises. They are part of a distributed ecosystem of fraud, human trafficking, cybercrime, and illicit finance that has evolved into a national security challenge for the United States.
▶ 0:01:59Our investigation found that while China does not centrally direct scam the Chinese government's deliberate failure to combat this threat has enabled their growth and global reach, increasing harm to Americans.
▶ 0:02:16For the first time, this report includes new findings exposing how a Chinese government-owned company directly contracted with a criminal to construct massive scam center in Southeast Asia. Make no mistake, the Chinese government has the ability to act to bring these scam center operators to justice, but it chooses not to.
▶ 0:02:43China's internal crackdowns on online gambling and domestic scam centers have pushed Chinese criminal operators out of the country and into Cambodia and Burma where weak governments, corruption, and political protection in those countries allows these scam centers to expand. At the same time, China remains essential to sustaining scam centers in the broader region.
▶ 0:03:09Chinese-language financial systems, cryptocurrency, and money-laundering networks provided the infrastructure necessary for scam proceeds to move rapidly across borders while evading Our investigation also highlights another horrifying dimension of this forced criminality and human Scam compounds across Cambodia, Burma, and other regional hubs rely heavily on human trafficking.
▶ 0:03:39Thousands of victims from across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America have been lured by false job advertisements, stripped of passports, threatened, beaten, and ordered to scam victims Our investigation does not just highlight harms to American families. It also discusses the direct implications for US national security.
▶ 0:04:06These China-linked scam networks weaken US partners by corrupting political systems, distorting economies, and eroding the rule of law. In countries where scam centers become entrenched, Chinese criminal act criminal actors gain leverage over infrastructure, political elites, and local institutions.
▶ 0:04:27This weakens the ability of regional governments to cooperate effectively with the United States on strategic priorities meant to defeat the CCP's authoritarian ambitions in the region. The Trump administration has taken decisive action to confront these scam by standing up the Scam Center Strike Force led by US Attorney Janine Pirro.
▶ 0:04:51In just the last few months, the Strike Force announced criminal cases against two Chinese nationals who managed a cryptocurrency investment fraud compound in Burma and seized more than 700 million in cryptocurrency. But isolated arrests and sanctions alone will not solve this problem. Congress must respond with urgency. First, we must pass the Dismantle Foreign Scam Syndicates Act.
▶ 0:05:21This bipartisan legislation, led by Representative Jefferson Shreve, passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee last September. As a lead co-sponsor, I encourage all of our committee members to join the growing list of more than 60 Republicans and Democrats supporting this bill. Second, we should prioritize China-linked scam centers as a cross-cutting national security problem.
▶ 0:05:47This threat overlaps cybercrime, corruption, human trafficking, illicit finance, and America's strategic It simply cannot be reduced to a single The Chinese-linked scam economy is stealing billions from Americans, trafficking vulnerable people into forced criminality, corrupting strategic regions, and undermining American security and We must act now.
▶ 0:06:19And I'd now like to recognize the ranking member, Ro Khanna, for his opening statement. Ro. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for your leadership on this issue, and thank you to our witnesses uh for coming uh from far for and participating today. Today, the Select Committee is releasing a bipartisan investigatory report on the China-linked scam networks that steal at least $10 billion each year from American victims, like some of them who are here with us today.
▶ 0:06:50I'm sorry for the pain you've been put through and appreciate you being here. Many of these scam networks operate from compounds in Southeast Asia that are controlled by organized criminal groups with links to China. Most of these uh are mysterious messages and phone calls. A text pops up on our phone that says, "How are you doing?" from an unknown number.
▶ 0:07:12All too often, the person on the other end of the text is a human trafficking victim locked in a scam compound with instructions to steal as much money from victims as possible. Americans are emptying their bank accounts to line the pockets of crime bosses, and the Chinese government, frankly, could be doing more to prevent these harms and hold those responsible Take the example of Xu Zhujun. After moving from China to Cambodia, he founded the Prince Group, which for many years operated one of the largest scam networks in the world.
▶ 0:07:43Through corruption, he operated with complete impunity, even becoming a cabinet-level advisor to Cambodia's Prime Minister. Meanwhile, he operated a massive human trafficking network to lure workers to his scam compounds, where they were forced under threat of torture to trick Americans into sending him crypto. The Chinese government say they condemn Sheu Chin Zour, who also scammed Chinese victims, and just this January they indicted him and extradited him back to China.
▶ 0:08:10But China only acted after his crimes were exposed to the world by Radio Free Asia journalists, which also led to sanctions and indictments here in And for the very first time, our investigation reveals that the Prince Group's headquarters in Cambodia was actually constructed by a Chinese state-owned enterprise. I want to be clear. While there are Chinese times ties, the scam is not a vast conspiracy by the Chinese government.
▶ 0:08:36As our investigation explicitly states, {quote} the scam industry is not directed by Beijing, and Congress should support tactical law enforcement cooperation with China. We can't solve this crisis without their cooperation. But clearly, China is not doing everything they could to hold their citizens accountable. Selective enforcement isn't enough, and it shouldn't take American investigative journalism to get a guy like Sheu Chin Zour arrested.
▶ 0:09:04The point is, only more important at a time when federally funded organizations like Radio Free Asia are uh being defunded. Last year, due to budget cuts, it even had to halt operations. What's more, the two US government agencies that first wrote reports on the China-linked scam compounds, USAID and US Institute for Peace, have entirely been eliminated by And it so happens three of the authors of that USIP report on scam centers are the committee's witnesses today,
▶ 0:09:34Mr. Sam, Mr. Tower, and Ms. West. Thank you for your work. Here's the truth. If we want to hold China's feet to the fire so they can't turn a blind eye to the suffering of scam victims in America and elsewhere, we need to be funding organizations like Radio Free America, USAID, USIP, and the NED NED that have proven track records for exposing scammers. But once civil society has exposed these scammers, we need to hold them accountable.
▶ 0:10:00In 2024, President Biden imposed the first-ever sanctions against a Cambodian scam compound operator when he targeted League Yalong Pet. In the past year, more sanctions have followed. Here in Congress, a bipartisan group of members has established a Stop Scams Caucus. Going after criminals who victimize Americans is a responsibility that you should unite each and every one of us. Powerful elites linked to China are scamming working-class Americans and using forced labor to do it.
▶ 0:10:29It is unacceptable, and it must stop. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your bipartisan leadership on this issue. Thank you. Appreciate it, ranking member. And if any other member wishes to submit a statement for the record without objection, those statements will be added to the record. I'll now introduce our three witnesses. Uh Ms.
▶ 0:10:49Erin West specializes in transnational organized crime with a focus on the criminal investigation and prosecution of crypto crypto-currency related cases.
▶ 0:11:03Erin is the co- is the founder of Operation Shamrock, a global nonprofit uniting law enforcement, industry, citizens, and victims to disrupt the world's fastest-growing form of transnational organized crime, digital Mr. Jacob Sims is an independent analyst and advisor focused on transnational crime, authoritarian political economy, and related security challenges.
▶ 0:11:33Across research, advisory, and policy work, he helps federal agencies, think tanks, and private sector partners understand and respond to criminal political ecosystems. He is a visiting fellow at Harvard University's Asia Center. Mr. Sims also assisted this committee as a bipartisan consultant on this topic, given his expertise. Mr.
▶ 0:11:58Jason Tower is a senior expert at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, where he works on organized crime, security, and illicit economies in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Myanmar and China. Since 2019, Jason has worked on the rise of criminal enterprises hosting scam operations across the region.
▶ 0:12:27And with that, I want to welcome all of our witnesses and thank them for being here this morning. And Ms. West, you are now recognized for your opening remarks. Thank you so much. Thank you, Chairman Moolenaar, Ranking Member Khanna, distinguished members. Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I want to tell you about Chris. Chris is a divorced father from He served the He served his country as an Army officer. He raised three sons.
▶ 0:12:57Two years ago, he became a grandfather. He was 4 years from retirement. A woman contacted him on Facebook. Beautiful, German accent, sophisticated. Chris was skeptical, and he asked for a video call. She agreed. She looked exactly like her Over the next several months, she convinced him to invest in what appeared to be a legitimate trading platform. It was fake.
▶ 0:13:23By the time Chris realized the truth, 90% of his retirement had been He called local police. They said they did not have the resources to help. He filed an FBI report. He never heard The Secret Service told him the loss was too small to prioritize. The fake profile used to scam him is still active today on Instagram. He has reported it repeatedly. Meta has responded that it does not violate community standards.
▶ 0:13:53Chris is not an outlier. He is the everyman American victim of this crime. And his story exposes the structural failures in our response. Local police without the tools, federal agencies without the capacity, technology platforms without the will. I'm also here on behalf of Don, a retired engineer from Florida. Scammers stole more than half a million dollars from him.
▶ 0:14:19And when law enforcement would not help, Don traveled to Singapore and Laos at his own expense. He hired a Chinese law firm. He identified a Chinese kingpin operating scam compounds across Burma and Laos. Don, a private American citizen with no badge, conducted the investigation our system was not yet built to do.
▶ 0:14:42I'm here on behalf of Mary, a Wisconsin paralegal who fed cash into a Bitcoin ATM 24 times in a local gas When law enforcement would not help, Mary built the case herself. She identified four Nigerian suspects and provided forensic evidence to law enforcement on two continents. Mary asked me a question I hope this committee remembers.
▶ 0:15:07Why in the United States in 2026 are victims having to solve their own This is not a collection of isolated fraud cases. It is an industrialized global criminal economy. I call it the Over the last 3 years, I have traveled repeatedly to Cambodia, Thailand, the Myanmar border, and the Philippines to investigate these compounds myself.
▶ 0:15:33I've stood outside scam compounds in Phnom Penh and been surrounded by men telling me to delete my video, one wearing a Cambodian police uniform. This is state protection in real time. In February, outside Phnom Penh, I found four new scam compounds lit up like an NFL stadium. So new they aren't even on Google Maps. The crackdown is largely a slight of hand. The industry is not disappearing, it is moving.
▶ 0:16:04I have met trafficking victims forced to perpetrate scams under torture and threats of death. The American grandfather whose retirement is stolen and the trafficked worker beaten inside a scam compound are victims of the same criminal enterprise, sometimes through the same keystroke. And this is no longer a consumer protection issue.
▶ 0:16:2638 mi from a Chinese-built runway on Cambodia's coast sits Ream Naval Base, where Chinese warships now dock The same patronage networks protecting scam compounds enabled that expansion. American household wealth is being extracted at industrial scale and is flowing through criminal ecosystems tied to hostile state influence and regional instability.
▶ 0:16:56This is not simply fraud, this is national security. For 4 years, I have been warning that this was already here. And for 4 years, the response has lagged behind the threat. We are not at the beginning of this crisis, we are 4 years since I've been talking, 6 years behind their start of this. Americans are losing their retirements, their homes, and in some cases their Victims cannot continue to investigate these cases alone.
▶ 0:17:26Local law enforcement cannot confront transnational organized crime without federal support. And voluntary action from technology platforms has plainly failed. Congress has the ability to change that. Fund the response. Pass the legislation. Treat this like the national security issue it has become. We cannot afford to be 4 more years Thank you very much. Mr.
▶ 0:17:56Sims, you may now proceed. Chairman Molnar, ranking member Khanna, and distinguished members of the select committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. Like Erin, but from a very different vantage, I've observed the scam compound phenomenon since well before it came to public light. And watching the world gradually and then suddenly awaken to the crisis has been quite encouraging.
▶ 0:18:22But much of that attention has been and remains focused on the compounds And that's understandable. What Erin has described here is nothing short of These compounds are destroying the lives of scam victims from America and all over the world. And they are trapping trafficking victims in horrific cycles of forced But the scam compound is only the visible front end. The deeper threat is the political architecture that protects it.
▶ 0:18:51And that's why I'm particularly encouraged by the committee report framing that rightly resists the simplistic explanation here. This isn't a single command and control-style conspiracy run by Beijing, but it's also not ordinary organized crime. Rather, you describe a highly complex system, a regional and global network with many nodes. And my work focuses on one part of that system that remains severely under-examined today.
▶ 0:19:19And that is what happens when transnational criminal networks not only enter a host country, but become embedded intractably in the political economic fabric of that Cambodia is the most mature case of that phenomenon today. And Cambodia cannot be understood merely as a cybercrime hub, a trafficking destination, or a problematic partner state in the region.
▶ 0:19:42And it is certainly all of those things, but more precisely, Cambodia is an advanced case of what criminal authoritarianism looks like in the digital era. This is a system in which illicit have become bound up with the incentives, the survival strategies, and the external alignments of the political order that exists there. And in my written testimony, I describe this as scam state architecture. And it has three basic layers.
▶ 0:20:09The first, at the top, are the external capital and capacity actors. These are the foreign criminals, the gray market actors that are predominantly from the People's Republic of China, who bring the money and the operating model. Second, is the territorial protection layer. These are the compound owners that Erin described, the local oligarchs who are bringing land and guards and But at the deepest level, you have your elite facilitators.
▶ 0:20:33These are the local actors who are giving access and regulatory insulation and connecting the whole system back to the state institutions at the very highest levels. These are people like Hun To, who is the cousin of Prime Minister Hun Manet, and also simultaneously a board member and a documented 30% shareholder in a firm that the Treasury Department has called a primary money laundering concern of the US government, and which is also widely described
▶ 0:21:03now as the largest illicit marketplace in And while numerous of Hun To's Chinese business partners are now facing accountability, he has never been sanctioned, never been indicted, and is free to visit or invest in the United States today. And in light of all of this, it is important to remember that modern Cambodia was not formed in a vacuum. PRC tolerance and selective enforcement have played a major role in the descent.
▶ 0:21:31But democratic governments have also all too often accommodated, underweighted, or looked past criminal autocracy in Cambodia in pursuit of other goals. And fully recognizing that this is the China Select Committee and not the Cambodia Select Committee, if your goal is to counter Beijing's influence, the democratic world has one real comparative advantage. And that is the promise of a different political future that is rooted in rule of law, accountability, human rights, and civic freedom.
▶ 0:22:00And in Cambodia, that advantage has been allowed to erode almost to the point of extinction. And we are now seeing and reaping the consequences of what grows in the space left behind. And admittedly, that is quite bleak testimony, but this is also not State behavior, even in a profoundly compromised place like Cambodia, is more than a series of calculable conditions.
▶ 0:22:24It can be altered, to quote one American by acts of cowardice or bravery, by wise leaders or cruel ones, and above all, by good ideas and bad ones. And in Cambodia, much of the bravery, the wisdom, and the clarity has come from people working against the tide. These are the local journalists, the local civil society leaders, people embedded in the local fabric of this broken and failed state.
▶ 0:22:50And if we want to counter scam states and other forms of criminal autocracy and malign influence around the region, we need to stand with these actors, not merely rhetorically or episodically, but strategically. And that that means three things as I close. First, we should apply pressure at the heart of the problem. Not just the foreign actors, not just the compound oligarchs, but the system-level facilitators, and in severe cases to the system itself.
▶ 0:23:14Second, we need to treat those frontline democratic actors, the local investigative capacity, not as nice-to-haves, but as core accountability and national security infrastructure. And third, we need to build an allied strategy that prevents this model from simply relocating and scaling elsewhere. Because I've spoken about Cambodia, but Cambodia is a warning. With state backing, cyber-enabled crime is lucrative, fungible, and scalable, perhaps without any criminal historic precedent.
▶ 0:23:44And if we fail to address the underlying architecture, we will keep chasing compounds while the system continues to export harms with ever greater severity upon Americans and people across the rest of the world. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Tower. The floor is yours.
▶ 0:24:03Chairman Molnar, Ranking Member Khanna, distinguished members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify Today, I would like to highlight five key points from my written testimony related to the role of China in this growing crisis of scams.
▶ 0:24:17First, the Chinese party-state, willingly or not, played a direct role in enabling the rise of industrial-scale scam compounds over the past two Police campaigns in China pushed legal gambling syndicates offshore throughout the 2000s, flooding Southeast Asia with criminal actors who bred corruption, undermined governance, and created permissive environments for organized These actors maintained deep ties into China and ultimately colluded with Chinese state-run enterprises tied to the Belt and Road Initiative, uh with
▶ 0:24:47whom they constructed infrastructure that is now used for industrial-scale scam operations. Second, as scam activity targeting China increased since 2020, China has rolled out significant measures including intense anti-scam campaigns, a ban on cryptocurrency, expanded surveillance, and a mass prosecution strategy prosecuting over 300,000 individuals involved in scamming Chinese nationals since 2021.
▶ 0:25:16These actions have functioned to reduce losses significantly in China, but have globalized the problem as syndicates adapted their recruitment pipelines and shifted targets abroad. The result has been the rise of what is known in Chinese as foreigner butchering. Scam operations focus on non-Chinese victims, targeting China's geopolitical rival countries such as the United States.
▶ 0:25:42Recent data from a major scam compound that was seized in Myanmar by pro-democracy ethnic armed organizations showed that over 50% of the activity in that compound targeted plus one numbers. Third, as global outrage grows, China's leveraged this issue to expand its security influence making anti-scam partnerships a centerpiece of its global security initiative, which aims to reshape global security norms and expand China's overseas security presence.
▶ 0:26:11Many countries now face a significant dilemma. Cooperate with China at the risk of legitimizing and advancing China's GSI platform or lose access to Chinese intelligence relevant to addressing this problem. Fourth, Myanmar illustrates the growing risk that China may leverage responses to online scams to advance broader geopolitical interests.
▶ 0:26:34After scam centers expanded dramatically in Myanmar following Myanmar's 2021 military coup, China cooperated with a Chinese-speaking ethnic armed organization to dismantle a major scam city on its border in the controlled territory of the Myanmar The military fought to defend uh the compounds that were largely scamming Chinese nationals, but was defeated.
▶ 0:26:58Following that defeat, China had the opportunity to continue putting pressure on the Myanmar military towards eradicating more of these scam syndicates. However, fearing that instability could threaten Chinese strategic investments, Beijing later shifted away from broader eradication efforts, tolerating scam activity while focusing on stabilizing the military regime and weakening resistance groups that might otherwise address the problems.
▶ 0:27:25Finally, as international attention increases, failures to comprehensively address scam operations in Southeast Asia have resulted in hundreds of thousands of scammers dispersing This is not a Southeast Asia problem. This is a global China problem. Let me turn now briefly to what the US can do to address these challenges.
▶ 0:27:45The US has a blueprint for a whole-of-government approach, the Dismantling Foreign Scam Syndicates Act, which if made law would provide the US with many of the tools and resources But as China-linked scam syndicates continue expanding globally, threats to the United States will become more and more acute. The US should establish a global response mechanism to monitor emerging scam hubs and coordinate preventative action a preventative action with partner governments.
▶ 0:28:11Early intervention, anti-corruption initiatives, intelligence sharing, and stronger partnerships with civil society and media can significantly disrupt this Washington should also continue shining transparency on the role of Chinese state actors in enabling these criminal ecosystems, while also seeking opportunities for productive coordination with China where interests align, particularly on intelligence sharing and on tracing and addressing illicit financial flows.
▶ 0:28:41Third, the case of Myanmar requires creative approaches. In 2025, a key pro-democracy resistance group, the Karen National Union, conducted a textbook demobilization of a major scam compound, gathering evidence, facilitating arrests, and exposing operations internationally through partnerships with media and civil society.
▶ 0:29:03This directly enabled US-Thailand cooperation, resulting in the arrest and indictment of two major China-linked criminals associated with that scam The United States should deepen cooperation with non-state actors in Myanmar who are working towards democracy in the country and who have outperformed both the Myanmar military as well as neighboring countries such as Cambodia in dismantling scam centers.
▶ 0:29:29Ultimately, addressing the rise of China-linked scam syndicates must become an integral component of the broader US strategic competition with the Chinese Communist Party. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you to all the witnesses, and now I would like to have a round of questions, and I'll recognize myself for 5 minutes of questions. We start with Ms. West.
▶ 0:29:53First of all, I want to thank you for all the work you've been doing representing victims across the United States that have been targeted by these scam centers. like Representative uh Khanna, I I want to just say our heart goes out to all the victims, and uh I understand uh some of the victims are here with us this morning, and we are so saddened to hear what you've been through. Um Ms.
▶ 0:30:18West, what is the one message that you want to make sure we hear from the victims of these scams? They're not being heard. And when they are reporting to law enforcement, they are not getting any help. And that's leading them to get secondarily scammed. It's leading them to do their own research and solve their own cases or to simply Google it and find someone who claims they can help them who is the secondary scam.
▶ 0:30:49And so there are ways to fix this and that is recognizing and empowering local and state law enforcement to have the resources to meet those victims when they come through the door and provide them with the tools and training they need to do quick evaluation as to whether or not there's something that can be done with their cases. Thank you. Mr.
▶ 0:31:13Sims, can you walk us through how the Chinese government deliberately pushed out the scam center operators from within China to other countries which effectively enabled these frauds on Americans? Yes, so effectively this is a result of a domestic crackdown on organized crime that happened starting several decades ago and this has continued.
▶ 0:31:38And so what you've seen and this is quite similar to the mode that we see today where when this these issues of of crime arise to a level to where they conflict with the interests of the Chinese government is that they take action, but that action has consistently had a displacing effect.
▶ 0:31:58And and the origins were criminals who found their way out of mainland China and into the region and found these more permissive environments that allowed them to grow and to Can you help us understand the direct links that the committee's investigative report found between the Chinese government owned construction company and one of the largest scam pound scam compounds?
▶ 0:32:23I think this is important because it shows a direct link from the scam compounds to CCP leadership in Yep, absolutely. So the the person in question that ranking member mentioned in in his comments as well as Chinza, uh who was the head of Prince Holding Group, which Treasury has described as one of the largest transnational criminal organizations in the world. Um Treasury also or uh Justice Department seized about 15 billion dollars in crypto assets from them um back in October.
▶ 0:32:54And but Chinza had uh outstanding legal trouble in China dating well back before uh his scam compounds emerged. And uh I think back in 2018 uh Prince Holding Group actually contracted directly with uh a Chinese state-owned enterprise uh that we refer to in the report as as Bureau 4 to construct buildings around Cambodia including a number of the scam compounds uh that later later came.
▶ 0:33:22And so this is at bare minimum a profound gap in scrutiny and due diligence uh between an apparatus of the Chinese government and what was at a person who was at that point already becoming well-known as a transnational criminal. Uh Mr. Tower, you've highlighted how Beijing has used crackdowns on scam compounds to expand its security influence in Southeast Asia.
▶ 0:33:50How should the United States balance cooperation with regional governments on counter scamming operations while preventing China from leveraging these operations to deepen its own geopolitical influence? Thank you for the question.
▶ 0:34:09I think what's key here is having a presence of uh US law enforcement in the region as well as having you know, a range of actors partnering with the US including civil society, including media to show some of the advantages of the US approach to addressing these problems. Um you see where China is advancing um these various forms of joint law enforcement cooperation, which effectively are placing Chinese police on the ground.
▶ 0:34:37In many cases, Chinese police then almost acting autonomously on on foreign territory, pushing to enhance broader Chinese security access in many of these countries. And I think you're seeing countries on the front lines like Thailand in particular are coming under a lot of pressure.
▶ 0:34:55But also you're increasingly seeing in geostrategically important areas like the Golden Triangle region, which is the area between Laos, uh, Thailand and Myanmar, where China's actually far from its borders developing even informal forms of police stations on the ground in response to this. I think what the US can do is show the advantages of US forms of policing.
▶ 0:35:23It can also provide and strengthen the ability of countries like Thailand to hedge as they're faced with pressure from countries like China to accept a Chinese police presence. Having the US, you know, they're working with Thailand, working with other countries in the region, gives those countries access to US resources and know-how, while also giving US access to critical intelligence. Which it can then, I think, use to approach China on these issues from more of a vantage point of strength.
▶ 0:35:54If the US is going and engaging China, just simply asking for help without having that intelligence, without having access to many of the devices that have been seized in cross-border operations around Thailand's borders or in the Philippines or other countries in the region where you've also seen law enforcement demobilize large scam compounds, without having that information, you know, I think China is going to be demanding quite a lot for assistance.
▶ 0:36:21However, if the US is shining transparency, working with partners to address these issues, it can approach China from a position of strength and demand that China take action on many of these so-called foreigner butchering operations that are now increasingly targeting Americans. Thank you very much. Now I'd like to recognize ranking member for 5 minutes of questions. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I believe America should be seeking restitution from these crime bosses and give the money back to victims.
▶ 0:36:50If the Chinese, Cambodian, and other governments cooperated, how could we go about doing that? To any of the witnesses. Thank you for your question. Um the first thing we have to do is we've got to find this money and that is doable. I think we have to I've always operated with a what if we could mindset and what if we could find additional money that that is out there that belongs to victims.
▶ 0:37:21We should be doing a full-scale investigation using the data that we already have to identify where this cryptocurrency or cashed out cryptocurrency is located and we should be recovering it for the victims. This is all doable work.
▶ 0:37:36We have not had the resources or the or the really the um the the We haven't had the we haven't had people at the highest levels of government supporting that this needs to be done for victims and that's really what we If I may add, this is a very important question. There's also a real-life solution to this.
▶ 0:38:03We we actually this is not a necessarily hypothetical question. We have $15 billion of Bitcoin that was taken from one of these criminal actors that is sitting and it's it is undetermined as of yet what is going to happen with that. I'm not I know we're not here to like get into all the legal specificities of what happens with that money, but the executive order by the
▶ 0:38:24Who has said money? Uh I think the Eastern District of New York uh holds it right now. The executive order that came out in March states at least that that money, not that specific money, but money reclaimed should all efforts should go to that money being returned to the victims of the crimes. And so I would I would urge officials to to make sure that that happens cuz we have a a world-changing amount of money that's just sitting there ready to go back and repay victims.
▶ 0:38:52Um if I could add, I think you've seen where um FinCEN has started to target many of the underground um uh banks and um online guarantee systems that Chinese criminal groups are using to move um massive amounts of illicit cryptocurrency stolen in the scams.
▶ 0:39:12And I think current estimates, and these are very conservative estimates, are that 20% of global illicit cryptocurrency flows are processed by Chinese, effectively Chinese organized crime Um some of these early efforts have already, I think, shown that it's possible to have significant disruptions to start cutting some of this off from um the global financial system.
▶ 0:39:34That said though, if you look right now on Telegram, there are countless numbers of these types of guarantee platforms that continue to process large amounts of And I think many of these, the vast majority of them, are not household names.
▶ 0:39:49No one's really I think doing that um gathering of that open-source intelligence, mapping out these different um illicit cryptocurrency laundering services, and then really looking at how to comprehensively target these, as well as to target platforms like Telegram that are used extensively to move those illicit flows.
▶ 0:40:06So I think that's ultimately where much more investment needs to go is in monitoring these illicit flows, particularly on cryptocurrency, and looking at how um we can bolster some of the efforts like the one that Jake just mentioned to go after and to seize these assets. Really only at that point, I think can we start to even begin to think about how to restitute the provide restitution and you know, justice to the many Americans who've lost millions of dollars to these Thank you.
▶ 0:40:38My last question is the Trump administration has sought to defund or shut down USAID, USIP, and the NED. The reality is that these entities have helped expose the China-linked scammers.
▶ 0:40:53To all of our witnesses, should all these agencies be fully funded and Due to my role on the committee, I can't advocate for the funding or defunding of specific organizations, but I I will say broadly speaking the local civil society groups that I I mentioned need three things. They need protection from repression, they need funding, and they need the right kind of funding. And right now they have zero of those three things.
▶ 0:41:21And as we rebuild foreign assistance, we need to prioritize nimble hostile environment funding that actually can reach the people who are doing the real work. Ms. Wass? Confirmed. I think the problem that we have in the locations that this these crimes are happening is we don't have eyes on the ground. Where previously we did have a lot of eyes on the ground. And so unfortunately with the defunding of so many of these entities, we have lost visibility into what's really happening there. So refunding is an absolute priority.
▶ 0:41:52This is largely echoing what's already been said, but I think that the role of independent researchers, media, and civil society is one of the most critical parts of the response. It's what has informed US sanctions until present. It's what I think ultimately has assisted the US in seizing the funds that have been seized thus far.
▶ 0:42:13Um so, without, you know, I think sustained uh funding to these types of groups, I don't think you're going to see the replication of what has been achieved over the past um couple of years in terms of um these initial seizures, these initial uh indictments, and um also, you know, the ability to put in place uh defensible types of sanctions packages.
▶ 0:42:36So, I think it's really critical that that support goes to uh civil society, to researchers, and to others that are working on the ground to make um this response possible. Thank you. Representative LaHood. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for having this important hearing today.
▶ 0:42:55I want to welcome our witnesses and uh grateful for your valuable testimony here today on this important Um as we've heard this morning from uh from you and from my colleagues, uh these scamming systems are really stealing generational wealth from Americans, and um really the current US response is is inadequate. And
▶ 0:43:19in addition to serving on this committee, I also serve as the chair of our Work and Welfare Subcommittee Committee on the Ways and Means And our work um on that subcommittee uh has demonstrated the vast network of fraud and scams targeting government uh and uh and targeting some of our most vulnerable populations here in the United States. Time and time again, victims of fraud and scams wait years before receiving compensation.
▶ 0:43:47And criminals who engage in this predatory behavior obviously must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and victims must be made whole in a timely manner. With increased access to digital infrastructure and advanced technological tools like cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence and fraud the fraud ecosystems that currently exist, uh they continue uh to wreak havoc in many ways on our system.
▶ 0:44:15And there is not a I guess a good one-size-fits-all approach um on on how we coordinate on this issue. Um but I do think it's uh fair to say that Congress must ensure we provide the necessary resources and tools to our federal agencies in order to keep up with the evolving scam ecosystem. So, Mr.
▶ 0:44:36Sims, in your written testimony, you mentioned that the US Department of Treasury estimates that Americans lose more than $10 million annually to Southeast Asia-based scam can you comment on what current mechanisms does the federal government have at its disposal to compensate victims of these scam networks? And and depending on that answer, what would be your recommendations on the direction we should go legislatively? Sure. Thank you for the question.
▶ 0:45:05And just to to clarify, it is 10 billion with a B. Um which is is likely itself significantly underreported given the uh the stigmas associated with this crime. And uh it's been uh sort of stated up here already, this is potentially the the largest form of financial crime impacting Americans today.
▶ 0:45:24Um I I'll repeat something I said earlier that the $15 billion uh that we recouped from the Prince Holding Group transnational criminal organization back in October represents the single largest pot of money with which to make victims whole, both American scam victims and victims of trafficking that were uh under the scourge of of Prince Holding Group's uh uh criminal activities.
▶ 0:45:48what the exact mechanisms to get that money to victims needs needs to be needs further evaluation, but we absolutely, in order to continue getting that money to a place where we could actually have the ability to do that, we need to make sure that we are fully funding not just a law enforcement response because I think as we've we've discussed and as your report rightly notes, this is well beyond a law enforcement challenge.
▶ 0:46:13We need to make sure the federal, the state, the local law enforcement is funded, have the resources to do their job, but we also need to make sure that our embassies, that our foreign policy apparatus, that our intelligence community is equipped and resourced in a way that we can work with those partners on the ground that have the evidence, that have the information to make sure that we are systematically getting that back into the system so that we can help Americans and people around the world recover what they have lost. And Mr.
▶ 0:46:40Tower, can you talk about the current responsibilities of private sector companies or the private sector in general to prevent their infrastructure from being manipulated or used in by these criminal syndicates? Yeah, so I think you're seeing that the criminal syndicates, if they don't have access to social media, if if it weren't for the ability of criminals to go on to social media and target people, you would see that many of these crimes would never take place.
▶ 0:47:09I think the the bottom line is that both with respect to targeting victims of scams, targeting victims of the so-called job scams or trafficking, that social media is used extensively. There is a nascent response, but I think the response is nowhere near the gravity of the problem until present. And until you have a much stronger, I think, response on the part of social media companies, these problems are going to get greater and greater.
▶ 0:47:35Of course, I think along with that, if you look at the overall supply chains kind of down around where these compounds are are located, effectively what you have in many of these epicenter countries are scam economies. There's layer after layer of business businesses that are providing the concrete, businesses that are providing Uh the internet connectivity, the telecommunications that are um almost industrial scale sales of SIM cards from pretty much every country across the world.
▶ 0:48:05You have many uh businesses that are involved in enabling um these crimes. I think one urgent task that needs to be carried out is a full look at supply chains globally. How are supply chains uh enabling um this criminal activity? And then, you know, what sorts of regulatory actions might be taken to push business in the direction of addressing some of the ways in which um their supply chains are complicit in this. Thank you. I yield back.
▶ 0:48:34Thank you, Representative Moran. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to our witnesses here today. Transnational crime organizations are indeed stealing the life savings of our families and committing mass fraud by deceiving their victims. Retirement accounts are drained and the hard-earned wealth for our nation's citizens are stolen by crime groups that operate these scam centers that we've been talking about today. This theft is severely affecting our country while China complicitly allows these operations to grow across Asia, as you guys have pointed out.
▶ 0:49:03In 2024, Americans lost at least $10 billion to cyber scam operations. This is an industrial-scale criminal enterprise run by Chinese transnational crime organizations out of the compounds in Southeast Asia built on human trafficking, forced labor, and sophisticated digital fraud. These scam centers across the globe target constituents in every state of every race and gender, and they are party agnostic.
▶ 0:49:29US Attorney General Pirro has uh US Attorney uh Pirro has described what these scam centers are doing as creating, quote, "a generational wealth transfer from Main Street America into the pockets of Chinese organized crime." I think that framing is is exactly right. We're not talking about a con artist running a scheme out of a garage.
▶ 0:49:48We are talking about compounds the size of factory floors, staffed by trafficked workers using AI-generated profiles and months of social engineering to systematically strip Americans of everything they have. Mr. Sims, you have studied these networks extensively. Let me start with you. What makes the current scam ecosystem so fundamentally different from traditional fraud schemes, and how can my constituents in Northeast Texas detect that they are being targeted by this type of scam?
▶ 0:50:18Thank Thank you for the question. Ultimately, what makes this system different is the scale, the sophistication, and the amount of protection that they receive. Um we have protection meaning from a very wide array of factors, but starting at the level of the host governments in which uh they are based. Um but also extending to what I would describe as statutory immunity for the large private sector organizations through which a lot of this is facilitated.
▶ 0:50:48Um and so in terms of a how how your how your constituents can be helped, um first of all, please please please do not uh engage with people who are reaching out to you that you don't know. That is basically as as as It's an It's an insufficient. It's totally inadequate. Um but don't don't give money to people that you've met I think what you said though is absolutely accurate. Every single demographic, every single person could fall victim to this.
▶ 0:51:16And uh there was a a a quote I heard just yesterday um that there's writing on the walls of some of these compounds that say, "There's not a single person who can't be scammed. They just haven't seen the right script at the right moment." So we just need to be vigilant, and we need to make sure that our infrastructure here in this country is providing a distributed form of resilience to this distributed threat. That's the report. Yeah, I can testify to this personally because I had somebody call me about 2 weeks ago, and uh their their spouse was on the phone with somebody right there and there.
▶ 0:51:46And I said, "Hang up. it's a scam and it took about 30 minutes for me to convince them it was a scam because they were for sure that it was real. They know what they're doing. They're very sophisticated in what they're doing. Question number two, I'm going to come over here to Ms. West. My career prior to coming to Congress was as an attorney and most recently as a county judge for Smith County in East Texas. Through that experience, I interacted with many different issues that faced our country, our county and our country and with the honorable leaders who sought to find solutions to those issues on the local level. Ms.
▶ 0:52:16West, you have experience as a deputy district attorney in California where you addressed these crimes head on and were successful in stopping this fraud while also restoring assets back to victims. Can you speak to the importance of local law enforcement and local governments in protecting our nation against these threats? Thank you so much for the question. Absolutely. Our victims are walking in the front door of their local jurisdictions.
▶ 0:52:39They need to be met with someone who understands what this crime is and is equipped to take the right information from them so that they can start the process to immediately see if there's anything that can be recovered for the victim. What we found is by bringing local law enforcement together, we're sharing information in a way that's never been shared before. Local law enforcement has united [clears throat] under this crypto coalition under Operation Chain Reaction where we're sharing information about how to do this new type of crime.
▶ 0:53:10We've been tasked with cryptocurrency investigations. Most people didn't sign on when they became a a new detective to be an expert in cryptocurrency What we found is that by giving them adequate tools, training and community, they are able to and are in real time helping victims get money back and get it back in their hands. This can all be done at the local level with the right amount of training, tools, community. Yeah, I agree. Thank you for those responses.
▶ 0:53:40This committee's role, Mr. Chairman, in Congress as you know, and as you guys have led valiantly is to address the threats that Chinese Communist Party poses to the United States as a whole and to our We've covered a lot of critical issues such as critical minerals, trade strategy, uh, military cooperation, and the advancement of innovation technology, but this topic today is one that has the most direct impact, I think, on our constituents on a daily basis.
▶ 0:54:04These scam centers, largely consisting of victims of human trafficking and forced labor themselves, are stealing directly out of the pockets of Americans, and we must do more as a congressional body. I look forward to advancing legislation and working with these witnesses and others that will help to leverage our law enforcement and stop these crimes altogether. Thank you for your time. I yield back. Thank you. Uh, now I'd like to recognize, uh, for 5 minutes Representative Jefferson Shrieve, who's joining us today without objection. Representative?
▶ 0:54:35Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate, uh, this opportunity to sit in with the committee today. I've been working on this issue closely as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the South Central Asia these scam centers, as those of us on the dais and in the room recognize, aren't isolated fraud shops. They're part of a much larger criminal ecosystem.
▶ 0:55:05However, many folks beyond this room, including our colleagues, aren't as informed as we want and need them to be, and our constituents aren't as informed as we want and need them to be. Um, I founded the Congressional Stop Scams Caucus with my colleague Zach Nunn and two Democrat colleagues toward broadening that effort. These scam centers steal from Americans. They steal from my constituents back in Indiana.
▶ 0:55:35They traffic and enslave workers. This is a crime with victims on two sides of the globe. They launder money. They operate in places where corrupt officials, criminal networks, and hostile actors look the other way and profit from the The important point, or one of the important points, is this.
▶ 0:55:55Beijing, since this is a focus of this committee's work, doesn't have to centrally direct every scam compound for this to be a China-linked national security threat. Selective inaction can be enough. PRC-originated criminal networks, China-facing financial systems, corrupt host governments, online platforms, crypto rails, and weak law enforcement environments reinforce each other.
▶ 0:56:26And Americans, our constituents, end up paying the Ms. West, Mr. Sims, Mr. Terry, your work has helped to bring this issue to the attention of Congress and the American people, as all of us on on this committee, House Foreign Affairs Committees, and others are working on this as well. That's why I led the Bipartisan Dismantle Foreign Scam Syndicate Act, which Chairman Meeks co-led with me.
▶ 0:56:53It passed unanimously out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, unanimously, Um as as observed before, this is not a bipartisan issue. This is a nonpartisan The bill creates a dedicated interagency task force, led by our State Department, to coordinate federal response to these foreign scam syndicates. The task force arising from this legislation can't be symbolic.
▶ 0:57:18It has to produce an operating picture, identify the people, the networks that protect these compounds, track the money, support the victims, and prevent the operations from simply moving from one weak jurisdiction to the next. Much of today's hearing has focused on the scale of the problem, China's role, and the threat these networks pose to So, I want to ask a a question or two as time may allow as to what comes next. Ms.
▶ 0:57:48West, you from the victim side, you share the stories of Chris, of uh of Don, of Mary. These aren't ordinary fraud cases. Victims are manipulated for months, they lose retirement savings. My own constituents, I've had some lose homes, home equity assets, their retirements. From your perspective, what is the current US response still miss about the victim experience? And what needs to change from a victim reporting standpoint?
▶ 0:58:15Financial institutions, um so, we can move fast enough. We know speed matters. So, we can move fast enough to freeze funds before they Thank you so much for the question. This is something that is doable and is not difficult. We need a central reporting system. We need one reporting system.
▶ 0:58:34We don't need victims reporting to all 17 uh three-letter agencies, and we need somebody on the other side of that reporting portal that is sending a thank you, we got your message, we are looking into this message. And then, we need a team of analysts who is on this. We don't need to be training every single individual in every jurisdiction how to trace cryptocurrency.
▶ 0:58:57We need a staff, a team of dedicated analysts who do this all day, every day, and who can look immediately at those addresses and say, is there anything that can be done with those? We are doing this in isolation, in pockets, in silos. We are not talking to each other.
▶ 0:59:15After 4 years of this, there is no reason that we don't bring everyone into a room just like this and say, "Show us your puzzle pieces, and let's start putting this thing together because it's not that hard. It's doable if you have the will and the resources to do it. I thank you for that. I would observe that from my seat now on appropriations. I aim to continue this fight in behalf of our constituents.
▶ 0:59:42Um because it does take resources to to to to move as it was observed in the comments earlier aggressively, smartly, briskly. And so I'll continue the fight from the Appropriations Committee as well. Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Thank you very much. I'd like to just provide an opportunity for some follow-up questions with our distinguished panel and we really appreciate you being here.
▶ 1:00:11we've discussed the crypto infrastructure and telecommunications But social media and technology platforms also play a major role in enabling these scams from recruitment and targeting to advertising and laundering legitimacy. In your view, and I ask this question to all three of you, what are major technology where they still the platforms still falling short?
▶ 1:00:39And what practical steps could they take right now to reduce harm without undermining legitimate online activity? I was struck uh your comments that Instagram still has an active account for the perpetrator of the scam and then Meta's comment was it doesn't violate community standards. But what practical uh steps could be taken?
▶ 1:01:06Practically, we need to impress upon these technology companies that they need to resource a response that's adequate to what is happening. We know if we're looking at the entire ecosystem of these scams, just as Jason Tower said, they don't start they don't get to our victims if without going through meta quite frankly. This is happening on the Facebook plat- platform, on Instagram, and all of almost all of the communication is being done on WhatsApp.
▶ 1:01:36What's happening is we have businesses making business decisions to not adequately resource the amount of effort that needs to be done to get these bad actors off their platform. It's a it's a business decision that we've seen. We've seen reporting by Reuters showing us that specifically they have made business decisions to accept 10% of their revenue coming from known scam advertisements.
▶ 1:02:01We need to regulate a situation where there is accountability for what you are allowing to happen in the United States and abroad. Yeah, I might add um in the report uh we the Chinese government as [music] an essential partner in this fight, but one whose incentives are profoundly misaligned. Uh I would I would put uh the social media platforms in that same exact category.
▶ 1:02:28Um in every single one of these companies, there are super talented, very effective people that are working very hard to combat scams. That's just that's just a fact. But at the very top of these companies, the situation that Aaron has described, um this is a a citation she's making from a Pulitzer winning article that came out a few months ago uh that states from meta's own internal documents that 10%, so that's $16 billion a year are coming from paid online
▶ 1:02:58scam revenue. Uh and there was actually civil litigation filed in Santa Clara County just last week um that tries to hold meta to some degree of account for the fact that they actually have acknowledged at the board level that this exists and have set protocols in place to make sure that any efforts that they undertake don't jeopardize too much of that revenue.
▶ 1:03:19And that exists because of what another court the court system that the judges in the Delaware 9th Circuit have said that we have stretched the concept of Section 230 to the point to a point beyond recognition which creates effectively I'm I'm I'm reading this as a quote that I had written down an all-purpose liability shield for internet platforms regardless of the harm and that's that was from a case having to do with the Rohingya genocide in
▶ 1:03:49Burma. Those harms extend to sex torsion and child sexual assault material that is rampant across these platforms and it is costing Americans tens of billions of dollars. And but this is not a capacity problem. This is not a problem of evil corporations that don't want to help.
▶ 1:04:06This is a problem of our current regulatory structure does not incentivize divesting themselves of such an enormous percentage of their All three of us I think speak regularly to people who have come out of scam centers.
▶ 1:04:23These are largely victims of trafficking and forced criminality and they've shared I think a lot about how easy it is for bad actors for example to go on to a platform like Telegram and buy in bulk accounts, Instagram accounts, WhatsApp accounts, SIM cards from many different countries around the world.
▶ 1:04:46And then to deploy those along with customized packages of photographs and other content that is used in the scams to deploy those very easily at very low cost. I think the information that comes from a lot of these survivors of forced criminality is incredibly helpful in terms of identifying exactly how these processes happen. But it also illustrates the scale, right?
▶ 1:05:11The fact that you have bulk sales of these accounts being carried out and the fact that simply the social media companies that that we've mentioned here, they don't have safeguards in place to prevent things like this from happening, to prevent large sales of accounts like this that are ultimately used to target and harm victims around the world.
▶ 1:05:32So, I think that this illustrates the extent to which you're you're seeing a wide range of companies not only social media, but also dating applications are used extensively in the You also have readily available on all of the main platforms, app stores, Google Play, all of these different sorts of places, the fraudulent financial applications that victims will inevitably download onto their phones through which they're they're losing these funds.
▶ 1:06:02So, I think you have layer after layer of corporate involvement in these different challenges and a real dire need I think to push for stronger regulation and stronger involvement of companies in addressing these challenges. Okay, Representative Shri. Thank you for this additional opportunity, Mr. Chairman.
▶ 1:06:25My question would best uh Well, actually directed to all three of 5490, the Dismantle Foreign Scams Syndicate Act, which is moved through through the um Foreign Affairs Committee passes and becomes the law of the land and this interagency task force is stood what should success look like in the first 90 days or so?
▶ 1:06:54I'm I'm not asking for broad goals, but from concrete early actions, what should Congress expect from our State Department, DOJ, DHS, intelligence and our embassies in the region if we get this up through a floor vote.
▶ 1:07:21well, maybe to start off internationally, I mean, I think one key gap that you have is you know, there are now large numbers of devices that are in places like Thailand and the Philippines. Lots of intelligence that's out there that is ready to be harvested and investigated. And I think currently you're already seeing a big uptick in terms of US partnerships with Thailand, US partnerships with the Philippines, and other countries where you have frontline states that are really looking to try to play a role in solving these challenges.
▶ 1:07:48I think in the first 90 days, if that cooperation can be bolstered um fivefold, tenfold, you know, such that more and more of that intelligence is being harvested, um more and more of the cases can um simply be be be traced down. Um we can get a better and fuller understanding of the modalities of the scams, um the range of victims that are being targeted.
▶ 1:08:11I mean, I think all of those things could happen early on uh if simply adequate resources are put into that type of um intelligence uh coordination and and gathering in um some of the different countries where um you have cross-border access into uh what's going on in the scam compounds. So, I think that that's a a key um uh area for for progress to be happening uh internationally. So, I'd add three quick points.
▶ 1:08:38Uh one, uh our embassies and our regional bureaus need clear direction on where this sits amongst a wide array of competing priorities. Uh we um you know, I I mentioned uh an individual in my in my uh opening testimony uh who remains uh unsanctioned, unindicted by the US Taking action against that person would have serious bilateral implications for the US government.
▶ 1:09:02Who's making the decisions right now and how important are those ramifications vis-a-vis the harms that are being lost uh by American citizens due to his criminal activity? Uh we need clear direction on on that. Second, um we need to move to codify into statute things like the Scam Center Strike Force, which uh is not symbolic. Uh it's not perfect, but it is doing real good that was not being done but it is statutorily fragile.
▶ 1:09:30Uh it exists purely um because it was because it was created, and we need we need uh to find a way to integrate that into the the larger infrastructure of the Department of Justice so that long after uh the individuals who are spearheading that effort are gone, that help to Americans remains.
▶ 1:09:48Uh and the last is we need to get tighter reins on the decentralized um organizations, both the exchanges uh and the large stablecoins, uh who currently have a relationship that has significant asymmetry with our law enforcement uh but law enforcement and judgments from uh civil cases as well as our sanctioning actions.
▶ 1:10:10Uh effectively right now because of some jurisdictional issues, when uh a wallet uh receives a judgment on it or gets designated with a effectively a one-off bilateral negotiation happens with that platform, uh and that is not doing the best good for the harms that are uh befalling Americans, and that issue actually extends the risks there extend well beyond this issue.
▶ 1:10:34Um Treasury uh announced a couple of weeks ago that they seized something like $300 million for that uh from a Iranian uh wallets, which actually had links back to Way One, which is involved in pig butchering.
▶ 1:10:49Um each of those uh seizures actually involves direct correspondence between lawyers um that were representing Tether, that basically they they made a they made a they said, "Okay, we'll do it this time, but it's not there's no uh compulsion." They these these uh crypto firms need access to the US market, but they are not actually legally compelled to comply with US law, and they make voluntary concessions in each one of these cases, and that something along that those lines needs to change as well.
▶ 1:11:20If I may just uh reclaim my time before we we my time expires, I want to thank the witnesses. All three of you for your work in fighting scams and working with our team toward advancing this legislation. I'm grateful for that. And uh Mr. Chairman, I thank you for your leadership on this subject as well. I yield back. Well, thank you very much, and uh yeah, I want to echo just how important this testimony has been.
▶ 1:11:48Uh also, these pictures really show the size and the scope of what we're talking about here. It really looks like an industrial park major operations, and uh you know, I'd just like to say that uh any member who would like to, you know, add an exhibit or submit testimony, it'll be uh due 1 week from today. And uh without objection, this uh committee hearing is adjourned.