The United States and the United Kingdom signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at jointly dismantling the organized scam operations — commonly called “pig butchering” compounds — that funnel billions of dollars in annual losses through investment fraud and romance scams. US Attorney General Jeanine Ferris Pirro met with officials from the UK’s National Crime Agency and Crown Prosecution Service to formalize the agreement, which enables parallel investigations, intelligence sharing on criminal syndicates, and coordinated prioritization of high-value prosecutions. A joint industry summit is scheduled in London for early October.
The scale of the problem justifies the diplomatic effort: cyber-enabled fraud now accounts for nearly 85% of all losses reported to the FBI, with annual US losses exceeding $12 billion — and that number is widely considered an undercount because victims often don’t report. The agreements are the work of the Scam Center Strike Force, led by Assistant US Attorney Karen Seifert and staffed by more than 150 personnel from the DOJ, FBI, IRS, and US Postal Inspection Service. The force recently disrupted the Prince Group, a Chinese money-laundering operation, resulting in approximately $15 billion in bitcoin seizures linked to CEO Chen Zhi.
The compounds themselves are forced-labor operations in Southeast Asia where trafficked workers are coerced into running online fraud scripts around the clock. Dismantling them requires coordination beyond any single country’s jurisdiction, which is what the US-UK deal is designed to enable.