Treasury Wants Banks Talking More About Scams
The U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is pushing banks to get more aggressive about detecting and reporting cyber-enabled scams, after an analysis found nearly $13 billion in suspected fraud activity flowing through the U.S. financial system since 2023, The Record reports.
FinCEN's alert, paired with a Financial Trend Analysis, reviewed roughly 33,900 Bank Secrecy Act reports filed by about 1,300 financial institutions between September 8, 2023, and December 31, 2025. Together, those reports flagged approximately $12.7 billion in suspected digital asset investment scam activity touching victims in all 50 states and U.S. territories. Traditional depository institutions filed the bulk of the reports — as much as 96% of the total — while crypto firms identified $5.5 billion of the suspicious flows and banks detected $6.4 billion.
Gene Lange, currently performing the duties of Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said digital asset investment scams "pose one of the most significant fraud threats facing Americans today," adding that the transnational criminal organizations behind them "exploit both emerging technologies and human vulnerabilities, resulting in devastating financial losses for innocent American victims."
Pig-Butchering Schemes and a Reporting Gap
The scams driving these losses are commonly known as "pig butchering," "romance baiting," or cryptocurrency confidence schemes. Perpetrators build fake personas — often posing as romantic partners, friends, or financial advisers — to earn a target's trust before steering them toward fraudulent investment platforms or apps. FinCEN said the schemes are largely run by transnational criminal organizations operating industrial-scale scam compounds in Southeast Asia, concentrated in Cambodia, Burma, and Laos, with operations increasingly expanding into South Asia, the Pacific Islands, Africa, the Middle East, and South America.
FinCEN's data shows suspected scam-related BSA reports grew by an average of 10.9% month-over-month across the study period, and separate FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center figures show reported U.S. victim losses from digital asset investment scams climbing from $907 million in 2021 to $7.2 billion in 2025. The agency noted that any single financial institution typically sees only one phase of a scam's lifecycle, which limits how much any one bank can piece together on its own.
To close that gap, FinCEN is giving banks specific filing instructions rather than general encouragement. Institutions filing a Suspicious Activity Report tied to scam-center activity are asked to include the key term "FIN-2026-SCAMCENTERS" in SAR field 2 (Filing Institution Note to FinCEN) and in the narrative, and to select "Fraud—Other" under SAR field 34(z) with the description "Scam Centers." FinCEN also published sixteen red-flag indicators to help compliance teams spot the pattern earlier, and pointed banks toward voluntary information-sharing under Section 314(b) of the USA PATRIOT Act so institutions can compare notes on shared scam networks. The alert builds on FinCEN's September 2023 guidance covering digital asset investment scams and advances a March 6 White House executive order on protecting Americans from cybercrime, fraud, and predatory schemes.
Why This Matters
FinCEN's own caveat is worth noting: the $12.7 billion figure isn't a confirmed victim-loss total. It reflects reported activity that can include attempted transfers, duplicate filings, funds moving in both directions, and later amendments — meaning the real number of dollars lost to victims could be lower, though the trend line is unambiguous either way.
The bigger issue is structural. Scam centers are engineered to exploit the fact that no single bank, exchange, or regulator sees the whole picture — a victim's money can hop between a traditional account, a crypto exchange, and an offshore wallet before anyone connects the dots. By standardizing how banks tag and describe scam-center activity in their SAR filings, Treasury is trying to turn scattered, inconsistent reports into a searchable pattern that law enforcement can actually act on. For everyday consumers, the practical takeaway hasn't changed: contact your bank immediately if you suspect you've been scammed, and report incidents to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center or a local Secret Service field office. But the scale Treasury is now putting on the problem — and its willingness to tell banks exactly what language to put in their paperwork — signals that scam-center fraud is being treated less like isolated consumer complaints and more like a systemic money-laundering threat to the financial sector itself.