Scam Center Strike Force Disrupts Cyber Fraud Networks in First Joint Government-Industry Week

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice, through U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro for the District of Columbia and Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Criminal Division, on June 3, 2026, released initial results from the Scam Center Strike Force’s first “Disruption Week,” a coordinated campaign pairing government entities with private industry to dismantle cyber-enabled fraud and cryptocurrency scams targeting Americans.

The week-long operation involved federal prosecutors, law-enforcement components, and technology and financial firms that collectively hold visibility into scam call centers, cryptocurrency laundering paths, and victim-payment flows. While the Justice Department did not release aggregate victim counts or dollar figures in its announcement, the initiative directly addresses fraud schemes that have defrauded Americans of billions of dollars annually through romance scams, government-impersonation calls, and cryptocurrency investment fraud.

The operational change is the creation of a standing strike-force mechanism that compresses the traditional gap between private-sector detection and criminal disruption. Prior enforcement relied on sequential handoffs between companies reporting incidents and prosecutors building cases over months; Disruption Week tested simultaneous takedowns, account freezes, and infrastructure seizures within a compressed seven-day window.

The June 2026 event marks the first formal test of this synchronized model.

Downstream, the strike force’s approach requires fraud actors to rotate phone numbers, virtual private servers, and cryptocurrency mixers on a faster cycle, increasing their costs and reducing success rates. Private partners must now maintain standing data-sharing pipelines with prosecutors, while the Justice Department must allocate Criminal Division resources to convert rapid disruptions into longer-term indictments.

The model also triggers parallel regulatory reviews by the Federal Trade Commission and financial regulators to codify information-sharing protocols tested during the week.

This is the first time the Department of Justice has structured a nationwide fraud enforcement action explicitly as a time-bound “Disruption Week” that treats private industry as co-equal operational partners rather than mere information providers. The announcement follows repeated public warnings from the FBI and FTC that scam call centers in Southeast Asia and cryptocurrency fraud have become the dominant vectors of financial crime against U.S. households.

Primary sources: U.S. Department of Justice