Chinese criminal networks stole $10 billion from Americans last year alone.
Now the United States and Britain are coming for them together.
Pirro just walked into the British ambassador's residence and signed something that locks these networks in a trap they cannot escape.
A Global Pig Butchering Empire That Dwarfs the Fentanyl Crisis
Chinese criminal syndicates spent the last decade quietly building an empire – entire walled compounds across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, staffed by human-trafficked workers forced to run cryptocurrency fraud operations at gunpoint, completely beyond the reach of American law.
The United States Institute of Peace estimated these operations generate more than $43 billion annually just from those three countries alone.
Americans are their top target.
Reported cryptocurrency investment fraud losses rose 89% between 2023 and 2025, reaching $8.65 billion, according to FBI data.
The scheme has a name: pig butchering.
Criminals spend weeks or months building fake romantic or friendly relationships online – on Tinder, Instagram, WhatsApp – before steering victims into fake crypto investment platforms.
One Kansas bank CEO was manipulated into moving $47 million through one of these schemes.
He went to prison for 24 years.
The fraudsters who took the money are still operating.
That banker was a sophisticated financial professional — and he never saw it coming.
The typical victim is a retired widow who gets a wrong-number text from a friendly stranger, spends weeks building what feels like a genuine friendship, and ends up wiring her life savings into a fake cryptocurrency platform that shows beautiful returns right up until the day it vanishes.
Nearly one in ten Americans over 50 have been approached by one of these operations, according to AARP research — and 55 percent of those who lost money never reported it because they were too ashamed to tell anyone.
How Pirro's Scam Center Strike Force Just Put $800 Million Back in Victims' Hands
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro founded the Scam Center Strike Force in November 2025 and has already frozen more than $800 million in criminal cryptocurrency for American victims.
She traveled to the British ambassador's Washington residence and signed the first-of-its-kind international memorandum with Crown Prosecution Service Director Stephen Parkinson and National Crime Agency Director Graeme Biggar.
The agreement locks the two countries into joint pursuit of the same criminal targets – shared investigations, coordinated prosecution decisions, and a joint disruption operation in London in early October that will bring law enforcement together with private-sector partners.
"The United Kingdom is one of our oldest allies and partners," Pirro said.
"Together we will disable the Chinese TOC networks that are operating these scam compounds and depriving our citizens of their hard-earned funds, all while using human-trafficked labor to increase their profit."
"Standing together, we are invincible."
Both countries have already found the same criminal organizations in their existing cases – and will now decide together which nation is better positioned to prosecute each target.
This agreement adds to a growing international campaign the Trump administration has assembled that Biden never even attempted.
In April, international cooperation produced 276 arrests and disrupted nine alleged scam centers across operations involving the FBI and authorities in the UAE, China, and Thailand.
Kash Patel Built a Chinese Crypto Fraud Task Force the FBI Never Had Before
FBI Director Kash Patel has established new law enforcement working groups with China itself – four of them, covering cyber fraud, violent crimes against children, counternarcotics, and a fugitive task force.
"Every month, they send their working-level MPS officers here, and the following month we go there," Patel said.
"They are speaking with us daily, which has also never happened before."
Trump signed the executive order directing federal agencies to disrupt foreign transnational criminal organizations in March 2025 – the first time an American president had formally designated this as a national priority.
An August memorandum expanded that effort by bringing vetted private companies into the fight, giving law enforcement access to financial intelligence and platform data that federal agencies alone cannot reach.
The Pirro-UK agreement, the Patel working groups, the April raids, and the March executive order are not separate stories — they are four pieces of a single coordinated campaign to dismantle the infrastructure that has been bleeding American retirement accounts dry for a decade.
For four years, Biden's Justice Department was occupied prosecuting Trump supporters and parents at school board meetings while Chinese crime syndicates built a $43-billion-a-year fraud empire targeting hard-working Americans and their retirement savings.
The USIP warned these scam centers could soon rival fentanyl as the top danger Chinese criminal networks pose to the United States.
Trump and Pirro are treating it that way.
Biden never did.
Sources:
- "Pirro Joins UK in Mass Crackdown on Chinese-Linked Scam Centers," Washington Examiner, September 2026.
- "Under Patel, FBI Forges Unprecedented Law Enforcement Ties With China, Russia," Washington Examiner, August 5, 2026.
- U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, "China's Exploitation of Scam Centers in Southeast Asia," July 18, 2025.