People still talk about how criminal actors in Southeast Asia keep exploiting online Scam of Americans, you know. It’s getting worse. In 2024, these scams hit Americans hard.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, you know, they went ahead and slapped sanctions on nine different targets today. These folks are tied up in the operations running out of Shwe Kokko.
That’s this big scam center hub over in Burma. It operates under the protection of the Karen National Army, or KNA, which is already hit with sanctions as a criminal group.
The KNA, basically, it’s this transnational criminal outfit that helps run those online scam operations. They target Americans a lot.
And they exploit workers stuck in forced labor situations. So yeah, that’s the deal with these new sanctions.
They lost at least 10 billion dollars, based on that U.S. government estimate. Basically, it’s a huge problem that just keeps growing.
OFAC went ahead and sanctioned four individuals plus six entities. They were involved in running those forced labor compounds over in Cambodia.
Workers there get forced into doing virtual currency investment scams. The victims come from the United States, Europe, China, and other places too, you know.
These sanctions help protect Americans from all that online scam stuff. It’s a pervasive threat, basically.
They disrupt the criminal networks’ ability to keep up this industrial-scale fraud.
That includes forced labor, physical and sexual abuse, and stealing people’s hard-earned savings. Oh and, it’s mostly Americans getting hit with the theft part.
The Department of the Treasury made these sanctions under Executive Order 13581.
That one got amended by E.O. 13863, E.O. 14014, E.O. 13818, and E.O. 13694, which was also amended. For more information.
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Read Original Article here – US. Department of states official
