Chairman Mast Leads Sanctions Letter Urging State Dept and Treasury to Investigate Southeast Asian Scammers and their Enablers for Sanctions

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Today, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-FL) and Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent asking them to investigate and, if determined to meet the statutory criteria, impose sanctions on foreign persons credibly linked to online scam centers. These sanctions investigations would significantly degrade the financial, business, and political structures in Southeast Asia complicit in online scams that have scammed Americans out of tens of billions of dollars annually.

"Americans are being scammed online at enormous and still growing rates, due primarily to a network of Chinese transnational criminal organizations based in Southeast Asia,” Chairman Mast and Chairman Moolenaar write. “These criminal syndicates have built industrial-sized compounds devoted to perpetrating complex online scams, including cryptocurrency investment scams often known as ‘pig butchering.’ These operations exploit Americans’ goodwill and good intentions through romance cons and other forms of devastating psychological manipulation."

In the letter, the lawmakers applaud the Trump Administration for taking increasingly strong measures to combat criminal scammers and their foreign enablers, including sanctions, criminal indictments, asset seizures, reward offers, and Executive Orders. The House Foreign Affairs Committee passed H.R. 5490, the Dismantle Foreign Scam Syndicates Act, in December 2025, which would codify interagency coordination and strengthen the U.S. government response to the scam center crisis.

Copies of the letter were provided to Attorney General Todd Blanche and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin. Read the full letter here.