Two leading U.S. congressmen have called on the Trump administration to undertake further investigations into Southeast Asia’s scam industry, claiming that government-led crackdowns are leaving many important enablers untouched.

The request was conveyed in a letter by Brian Mast (R-FL), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and John Moolenaar (R-MI), chairman of the Select Committee on China, dated Tuesday. In the letter, which was addressed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, the pair requested further actions to combat scam operations in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar.

In particular, Mast and Moolenaar requested a probe of 28 individuals and entities who have been accused of involvement in online scamming operations in the three nations, asking for a determination within 180 days as to whether they “meet the statutory criteria for imposition of sanctions” under U.S. law. The list includes businesspeople and government officials, including two sitting Cambodian ministers.

“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,” the two congressmen wrote. “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.”

Online scamming operations have proliferated across mainland Southeast Asia since the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in loosely regulated parts of Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. Coordinated predominantly by Chinese organized crime syndicates, these industrial-scale scam operations run romance-investment and crypto scams that target victims across the globe.

In addition to victimizing those on the receiving end of the scams, these operations rely on a large, indentured workforce – mostly ordinary people who have been trafficked or lured under false pretenses and held against their will. Inside scam centers, victims have reported being confined in cell-like rooms and subjected to beatings, mistreatment, and torture.

The Congressional request comes after a year in which authorities in Myanmar and Cambodia, under growing outside pressure, particularly from the United States and China, have launched well-publicized crackdowns on scam operations.

These have supposedly led to the demolition of the massive KK Park and Shwe Kokko scam hubs in Myanmar’s Karen State, and the eradication of online scam compounds in Cambodia – at least if Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, who heads the government’s ad hoc Commission for Combating Online Scams, is to be believed.

Whether these crackdowns have gone far enough remains, however, a very open question. A report released yesterday by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute highlighted the extent to which transnational crime and formal structures of governance have become interleaved.

According to the report, which was authored by Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard University and columnist for The Diplomat who specializes in Southeast Asia’s scam economy, wrote that by early 2026, scamming operations “had become a massive source of income for both the transnational syndicates and a set of elite co-perpetrators atop Cambodia’s party-state.”  This included “the ruling Hun family, many powerful party-state elites, and the formal institutions under their collective control.”

In their letter to Rubio and Bessent, Mast and Moolenaar cited abundant evidence claiming that “corrupt” senior government officials in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos have “turned a blind eye to this criminal activity at a shocking scale.” They also expressed concerns that few, if any, would likely be held to account, given that past crackdowns in these countries have “been largely performative.”

“While in recent months some regional governments have increased pressure on the scam industry, the financial networks, organizers, and political protection structures that enable it remain largely intact,” they wrote. “Impunity for perpetrators remains the norm.”

Among the most prominent figures listed in their letter was Cambodian Interior Minister Sar Sokha. Sokha was reportedly a former director of Jin Bei (Cambodia) Investment Co. Ltd., a firm that has developed casinos and scam centers in the port city of Sihanoukville, and has since been sanctioned by the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Sokha has denied any involvement with scam operators and has hired two U.S. law firms to help keep him off the Treasury Department’s sanctions list.

Also on the list was Vorapak Tanyawong, a former Thai deputy finance minister who resigned in October after the publication of a report claiming that he had received $3 million in cryptocurrency from a Chinese-Cambodian criminal network. This network was allegedly connected to Benjamin Mauerberger (aka Ben Smith), a South African national who is alleged to be at the center of a complex financial web involving a number of prominent Cambodian and Thai political figures, some of whom are linked to the online scamming industry.

Among the other prominent figures listed in the congressional letter were Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Neth Savoeun; deputy Cambodian police chief Dy Vichea (also a son-in-law of former Prime Minister Hun Sen); and Hun To, a cousin of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet who has acknowledged owning a 30 percent share in Huione Pay PLC, a digital payments platform sanctioned by the U.S. government for alleged money laundering and ties to transnational scam operations.

Whether or not the letter produces any action by the Trump administration remains uncertain. In the cases of both Myanmar and Cambodia, rising awareness of the industrial scale of the online scamming problem has coincided with a realist turn in U.S. policy toward both countries, and particularly toward Cambodia, aimed at counterbalancing Chinese influence.

The U.S. government has already sanctioned a number of well-connected Cambodian businesspeople, including Ly Yong Phat, Kok An, and Chen Zhi, the chairman of the tentacular Prince Group, for their involvement in online scams. However, it currently has a strong diplomatic incentive to avoid directly implicating sitting government officials and other close allies of Hun Manet in the scam economy.

The most likely outcome is that Washington will accept the Cambodian government’s crackdown claims at face value in the interests of maintaining stable relations with Phnom Penh.