A wave of digital scams backed by global crime syndicates, scam cities, and political inaction is overwhelming victims, law enforcement, and infrastructure alike — at the Twin Cities Fraud Summit, speakers pulled back the curtain on a crisis few fully understand, and even fewer are ready to confront
EAGAN, Minn. — The 2025 Twin Cities Fraud Summit opened with a message that was hard to ignore. Across three towering screens in the main auditorium where the event was held, a stark warning appeared in bold capital letters: WE ARE AT CRISIS LEVEL. Nearly 200 attendees from law enforcement, banking, and the broader anti-fraud community took their seats in relative quiet.
“If you don’t leave this room scared, we haven’t done our job,” said keynote speaker Erin West, a former prosecutor and the founder of Operation Shamrock. West, who spent years prosecuting cybercrime and tracing cryptocurrency scams, launched Operation Shamrock alongside Hailey Windham, a certified financial-crimes expert who pivoted from banking after witnessing firsthand the damage that fraud and scams can inflict on clients. Both women bring a deep understanding of the fallout these scams leave behind — grief, regret, and in many cases, lasting financial ruin.
The summit, hosted by the Minnesota chapter of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (recently named Chapter of the Year) focused on one of today’s most urgent challenges: the proliferation of digital scams to steal billions of dollars from victims, the utilization of cryptocurrency to shield the stolen wealth from law enforcement, and the growing scale of transnational organized crime. The latter was of special focus, as the efforts had gone from merely a small industry of scammers to one that now dwarfs some national economies, has deeply infiltrated politics, and employs an army of slave labor to fuel an industry which stole at least $10 billion dollars from victims in the United States alone in 2024 — and that’s only the sum value of the reported crime.
The fraudsters at the heart of today’s scams aren’t the scammers of old, such as lone wolves with clever lines. Instead, they’re part of a well-oiled industry. So-called pig butchering scams, in which victims are slowly groomed through fake relationships before being coerced into fraudulent investments, have become disturbingly common. The audience was shown real examples: a text from a wealthy, yoga-loving woman who accidentally messaged the wrong number, or a carefully scripted dog story designed to build trust. Each one plays on emotional vulnerability, particularly loneliness, which has surged since the pandemic.
These aren’t clumsy cons; rather, they’re meticulously planned operations, complete with scripts, psychological playbooks, and even physical compounds. And the scale is staggering — no matter who you are or where you live, chances are someone in your network has found themselves being put on the hook.
As one speaker put it: “You may not reply — but your cousin might.” These aren’t clumsy cons; rather, they’re meticulously planned operations, complete with scripts, psychological playbooks, and even physical compounds. And the scale is staggering — no matter who you are or where you live, chances are someone in your network has found themselves being put on the hook. Perhaps one of the most visual aspects of the entire Fraud Summit was when presenters asked how many people in the audience had received very specific scams over text just in the last week.
Half the hands in the room went up.
Rise of the scam factories
While the scams may feel personal, their origins are anything but local. In Southeast Asia, entire cities have been transformed into scam factories, built not for tourism or commerce, but for extracting as much wealth as possible from as many victims as possible. The pandemic’s collapse of casino and tourism industries created a vacuum quickly filled by organized crime syndicates. The Chinese triads in particular pivoted their infrastructure toward industrialized online fraud. In Cambodia, Myanmar, and the Philippines, gleaming high-rises and resort-style compounds house an estimated 125,000 people in captivity, many trafficked under false job offers and then trapped behind chain-link fences, armed guards, and even escape tunnels for the bosses who run them.
These cities — increasingly built by the triads and fueled by the billions of dollars in gains from their operations — now function as high-tech crime hubs, outputting deceptive mobile banking apps, fake trading platforms, and scripted paramours designed to gain people’s trust and then exploit it.
In Cambodia, in fact, fraud has grown so large that it rivals the nation’s legitimate industries, transforming a massive section of the nation’s economy into a criminal enterprise that operates in plain sight and with open recognition. At the same time, the geopolitical terrain has shifted. A Chinese-built international airport sits adjacent to a naval base once shared with the United States — until Beijing offered to dredge the harbor, and Washington was asked to leave. Now, the airport’s primary customer isn’t resorts or industry, it’s the ever-growing fraud compounds that it was built to service. Yet this is by no means solely an issue of corruption in Asian nations. When Thailand turned off a cell tower being used by a massive scamming compound in neighboring Myanmar, the walled, razor-wired compound simply turned to an American company.
Indeed, Elon Musk’s Starlink now beams internet directly into some of these remote compounds previously cut off from traditional telecom networks, bypassing the international efforts to shut them down. Further, American telephone companies allow scam texts to be sent to inboxes on a seemingly daily basis, even while other services such as Google’s Gmail automatically blocks such content from being sent — a fact that Operation Shamrock’s West discovered while building her presentation’s PowerPoint.
And through it all, victims around the world (the majority of whom are under 60 years old) are losing retirement accounts, home equity, and life savings to operations with military-grade logistics and acting with global impunity.
Global policy on fraud lacking
Despite the scale and sophistication of these operations, however, the global policy response remains dangerously underdeveloped. In many jurisdictions, there are no clear laws governing the seizure of crypto assets, just gray zones.
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“There’s nothing saying you can’t take them, but nothing saying you can, either,” one speaker noted. However, law enforcement agencies are hopelessly undertrained and operate far too slow to keep up with the nature of these frauds. As another speaker explained, while it’s often two weeks for a detective to be appointed to investigate a case, it usually takes less than one week to shepherd the assets forever out of reach.
International coordination is still in its infancy, and the political will to prioritize this type of crime is being undermined by gutted departments and distracted governments. In the United States, fraud-fighting budgets are shrinking even as losses skyrocket. The broader message from Washington has not inspired much hope.
And yet, there are glimmers. Recent cooperation with Thai authorities has started to yield results, and regional crackdowns in the Philippines have uncovered scam centers — some complete with armored cars and panic rooms — filled with notebooks, scripts, and rows of computers.
Victims and investigators are finding each other more quickly now too, and a growing movement is forming around community-based resistance that is teaching people how to spot fake profiles, use reverse image searches, and demand accountability from tech platforms and elected officials alike. While the fight is far from over, it’s no longer being waged in silence.
The words that opened the summit — WE ARE AT CRISIS LEVEL — weren’t a rhetorical flourish, they were a diagnosis. What’s happening in scam compounds today is set to evolve into deepfakes and AI-driven fraud tomorrow, fueled by networks already built, tested, and incredibly well funded. There’s no cavalry coming, no bills on the table capable of tackling the emergency, no international effort with the heft and depth to turn the tide.
There’s still time to act, however. From local vigilance to global coalitions, this crisis demands collective effort, and the 2025 Twin Cities Fraud Summit was a small step in that direction.
You can find more information on the challenges financial institutions face in fighting money laundering and other financial fraud here
