We’ve been writing a lot about scams and fraud lately — mostly because the Trump administration has been cracking down on such abuses in ways most of us have never seen before. Certainly not from previous administrations.
The FBI has been tracking down Top 10 Most Wanted fugitives overseas and bringing them home to face the music; the Department of Justice is routinely recovering billions of dollars and locking up fraudsters in places like Minnesota, and the Treasury Department is sanctioning bad actors with regularity.
One word — or one country, I should say — keeps coming up: China.
Often it’s because CCP-linked actors are caught engaging in acts of espionage and subterfuge, but they’re not above practicing wholesale scam operations either. U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro — often referred to as Judge Jeanine because she actually was one and called her long-running daytime show by that name — announced Wednesday that her Scam Center Strike Force has taken down huge operations run by Chinese organized crime.
My Scam Center Strike Force took decisive action to dismantle illicit networks targeting innocent victims.
— Jeanine Pirro (@JudgeJeanine) September 9, 2026
🔺 Shut Down Illicit Marketplace
🔺 Restrained $52M+ in Crypto
🔺 Brought Sanctions
🔺 Dismantled 13 Compounds in Madagascar
The Strike Force will continue to dismantle… https://t.co/csFWaBpCKi pic.twitter.com/TlIgiJojHB
My Scam Center Strike Force took decisive action to dismantle illicit networks targeting innocent victims.
🔺 Shut Down Illicit Marketplace
🔺 Restrained $52M+ in Crypto
🔺 Brought Sanctions
🔺 Dismantled 13 Compounds in Madagascar
The Strike Force will continue to dismantle Chinese organized crime, those who facilitate it, and protect Main Street America.
The DOJ released a statement Wednesday detailing how the criminals set up illicit marketplaces for scam services. The idea was to provide ways for scammers to launder money, set up official-looking websites to bilk unsuspecting victims out of their cash, and use their knowledge of cryptocurrency to help facilitate fraud on a large scale.
On the scale of almost a billion dollars recovered so far, actually:
The Strike Force and the Department of the Treasury took coordinated actions against Xinbi Guarantee (“Xinbi”), an illicit marketplace for scam services, and the Strike Force deployed to Madagascar to assist in the taking down of 13 Chinese-run scam compounds. Approximately $52 million of cryptocurrency involved in scam money laundering was restrained in one day, bringing the total restrained by the Scam Center Strike Force to approximately $938 million.
The Treasury Department estimates the total figure processed by Xinbi at an astonishing $24 billion.
The marketplaces are complicated, but here’s the short version of how they work:
As alleged in a seizure warrant unsealed today, Xinbi is a Chinese-language illicit marketplace, run on Telegram, where vendors market their services to scam center operators. The Telegram channel operated primarily in Chinese, and the vendors post their available services on the Telegram channel, to include creating custom scam investment websites, laundering or “washing” money that scammers obtain from victims of wire fraud, and soliciting trafficking victims to work in scam compounds in Southeast Asia.
The networks have one goal: strip unaware targets, many of them elderly, of their assets. There are many sad stories like this one, which was posted in response to Pirro’s tweet:
My mom just got scanned out of $1400 from someone in china pretending to be from Apple. The bank won’t help her get her money back. She’s been in tears for days and can’t make her house pymt. They took her entire social security check. Sad.
— LatieJones ✨🤍✨ (@latiejones1111) September 9, 2026
Many of these scams involve so-called “pig butchering,” which is so named because the perps treat the victims, whom they’ve contacted over the phone or through the internet, as pigs to be fattened with trust, attention, and hints of potential romance. They are then figuratively “slaughtered” by taking their money. Encouraging their prey to send first small but then larger amounts in crypto is often the preferred method because it’s hard to track, and the whole thing is disturbingly effective.
I’m sure many of our readers know of loved ones or friends who have been fooled.
It’s also an incredibly cruel crime. It might not be Judge Jeanine banging down the gavel in a courtroom in the future, but it would be quite satisfactory to see an angry jurist throw as many of these financial sadists as possible behind bars in the near future.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump, illegal immigration into our great country has virtually stopped. Despite the radical left's lies, new legislation wasn't needed to secure our border, just a new president.
Help us continue to report the truth about the president's border policies and mass deportations. Join RedState VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the Conversation
VIP members get the ability to comment on articles.