A coordinated international operation led by Dubai Police has dismantled nine cryptocurrency investment scam centres and arrested at least 276 people, with three defendants now facing federal wire fraud and money laundering charges in the Southern District of California.
The US Justice Department announced on Tuesday that a coordinated international operation led by Dubai Police has dismantled nine cryptocurrency investment scam centres and arrested at least 276 people, with three of those defendants now facing federal wire fraud and money laundering charges in the Southern District of California.
The action is the FBI's largest cross-border push against pig-butchering operations to date — and it leaned almost entirely on foreign police work. Of the 276 arrested, 275 were detained by Dubai authorities under the United Arab Emirates' Ministry of Interior, with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, Thailand's Royal Thai Police, and several other agencies working alongside the FBI. The criminal complaints filed in San Diego name Thet Min Nyi, Wiliang Awang, Andreas Chandra and Lisa Mariam, plus two fugitives, and tie the alleged scheme to companies identified as Ko Thet Company, Sanduo Group and Giant Company.
This is the second major scam-centre operation this month. On 23 April, the DOJ's Scam Center Strike Force — working with OFAC and the State Department — took down 503 fake cryptocurrency investment websites, restrained more than $700 million in cryptocurrency, seized a Telegram channel used to recruit trafficking victims, and charged two Chinese nationals for managing the Shunda compound in Burma. Tuesday's arrests are layered on top of that.
The targets are familiar to anyone who has read the FBI's IC3 reports for the last three years. So-called pig-butchering scams use long-form social engineering — weeks or months of fake romantic or business relationships — to convince victims to deposit funds into bogus crypto trading platforms. The platforms display fabricated balances and fake gains, and the moment a victim tries to withdraw, the funds are gone. The FBI says US-targeted losses from this single category exceeded $5.8 billion in 2024.
What separates the new operation from earlier crackdowns is the pivot from chasing individual money mules to attacking the physical infrastructure. The dismantled compounds in Cambodia, Burma and Laos house thousands of trafficked workers — many of them lured by fake job ads — who are forced to run the actual scams under threat of beatings or worse. Closing the centres rather than arresting the closers is the difference between treating a leak and shutting off the tap.
Each of the San Diego defendants faces a maximum of 20 years in prison for wire fraud conspiracy and another 20 years for money laundering conspiracy, with fines that can reach the greater of $500,000 or twice the gain or loss. Investigators have linked millions in losses to the specific schemes named in the complaints, though the broader networks operating under the same companies are believed to have moved far more.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Matthew Galeotti said the takedown showed that scam compounds operating overseas are not beyond the reach of US law enforcement. The phrasing matters; until last year, that statement was largely aspirational. Cambodia and Myanmar's military junta have been notoriously uncooperative, and the only meaningful enforcement came from China cracking down on its own nationals running the operations. The Dubai connection is what changes the calculus — the UAE has become a transit hub for the proceeds of these schemes, and a crucial link in the laundering chain is now turning hostile to the operators.
For the crypto industry, the political signal is more important than the headline numbers. The Trump administration has spent its first hundred days dismantling the SEC's enforcement posture against crypto firms while simultaneously sharpening DOJ action against bad actors using crypto rails. That distinction — pro-industry, anti-fraud — is the operating thesis of the new regime, and it is being demonstrated through cases like this rather than press releases.
The April actions have also exposed the role of Tether's USDT in the laundering chain. Most scam-centre proceeds move in USDT on Tron, where Tether's compliance team has frozen tens of millions tied to the strikes. Circle has been more conservative on freezing, citing legal exposure — a stance that has drawn explicit criticism from Treasury officials who want stablecoin issuers to act faster on actionable intelligence.
Tuesday's arrests will not stop the operations entirely. A dismantled compound can be rebuilt across a border in weeks, and the human cost of the model — trafficked workers, including children — has not changed. But the scale of the cooperation is new, and so is the willingness of three previously hostile jurisdictions to work to a single operational tempo. The 276 in custody have already given prosecutors leverage they did not have a year ago.
