- The US Treasury’s FinCEN arm asks financial institutions to file scam center suspicious activity reports under a new keyword
- FinCEN says that it flagged financial moves across 33,904 different filings, but actual losses might differ significantly, as the approach is prone to double-counting transactions
- Only 1,300 institutions filed reports, with 10,082 (29.7%) of them centering around exploitation of the elderly by scammers
The US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has issuespublished an alert and a companion data analysis telling banks, credit unions, digital asset exchanges, and securities firms that it needs sharper reporting on the overseas scam centers that it says target Americans at an industrial scale.
FinCEN puts total damages, per its reporting mechanism, at roughly $12.7 billion linked to suspected digital asset investment scams between September 2023 and the end of 2025.
The number comes from adding up the dollar values of 33,904 Bank Secrecy Act filings that referenced the keyword from its 2023 “pig butchering” alert, which may be overstated, as it includes both attempted and successful transactions as well as both inbound and outbound reports, often of the same transactions, causing significant overlap.
FinCEN’s new requirement is a keyword
While the $12.7 billion is a measure of what institutions have flagged and is prone to double-counting and errors, victim losses, a significant chunk of which go unreported, may be considerably higher.
This has prompted Gene Lange, who effectively works as the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, to call these scams “one of the most significant fraud threats facing Americans today.”
It has also prompted a new suspicious activity report keyword: “FIN-2026-SCAMCENTERS,” which institutions are expected to use to indicate that a scam center is potentially involved.
FinCEN also wants chat logs, scammer phone numbers, social media handles, wallet addresses, transaction hashes, and the URLs victims were told to deposit into, filed in the structured cyber indicator fields rather than left out.
Institutions to volunteer more information to stop scams
The move is part of its push to have institutions volunteer more information under the US Patriot Act, as it aims to confront what is a growing intelligence problem: scammers tend to route victims through several institutions in sequence; most filers see only one slice of a scam’s lifecycle and often have difficulty tracing it all the way.
For example, a crypto exchange might see a customer buying USDT and sending it off-platform, a bank might see a wire to that exchange, and a brokerage might see a retirement account liquidated. None of them would have the bigger picture of what essentially happened or what triggered the transaction.
Combined, with properly linked information, it makes it much easier to identify a potential scam; separately, these incidents can inflate the number of reports, which often aren’t linked, and investigations can lack insight into the origin or final destination of the funds.
FinCEN’s Rapid Response Program has interdicted $1.8 billion and recovered just over $1 billion for 5,790 US victims since 2015, which, against the flagged totals, is a very limited recovery at best compared with the actual funds at stake. This highlights a larger fundamental problem: institutions mostly detect these schemes after the money is gone, and reporting them correctly and thoroughly may yield limited dividends at best against an industry that has morphed, relatively unchecked, into a multi-billion-dollar juggernaut.
