This was the week the United States and China announced the first publicly reported, jointly executed enforcement operation against transnational fraud, with 276 arrests across nine scam centres in coordinated US–PRC action. Operation Level Up’s victim-notification programme passed half a billion dollars in losses prevented. Meta took down 150,000 scam accounts in a single sweep. And the FCA published its annual fraud and financial crime workplan, naming AI-enabled scams and crypto market integrity as its 2026 priorities. The pattern is bilateral coordination producing operational outputs that no single jurisdiction could have achieved alone – a meaningful shift, but one that exposes how dependent disruption now is on the political appetite of a small number of states.

US–China Coordinated Operation: 276 Arrests, Nine Compounds

A coordinated international operation involving US and Chinese authorities arrested at least 276 suspects and shut down nine cryptocurrency scam centres, according to a 29 April announcement that the DOJ described as “unprecedented” in terms of bilateral cooperation. Six defendants, including Thet Min Nyi (27), Wiliang Awang (23), Andreas Chandra (29) and Lisa Mariam (29), face federal fraud and money laundering charges in the US for their roles in pig-butchering compounds run out of Cambodia and Burma. Two further co-conspirators remain at large.

The operational significance is one thing; the geopolitical significance is another. Sustained US–China law enforcement cooperation on transnational crime has been historically constrained by political tension. That this operation happened at all suggests both sides have concluded the reputational costs of inaction outweigh the political costs of cooperation – at least where Chinese-national victims and Chinese-national perpetrators converge, as they do in pig-butchering. The criminological lesson is one I have made before: organised fraud is so structurally globalised that no single jurisdiction can disrupt it. The political lesson is that necessity, eventually, produces alignment.

Operation Level Up Passes $562 Million in Losses Prevented

The DOJ confirmed that the FBI’s Operation Level Up, a victim-notification programme that proactively identifies and alerts victims of cryptocurrency investment fraud, has now notified almost 9,000 victims and saved an estimated $562 million since its launch in January 2024. This is, to my knowledge, the first US enforcement programme to publish prevention metrics at this scale.

This matters because it operationalises something the field has talked about for years: that the most cost-effective intervention in fraud is interruption mid-cycle, after the victim has been identified by the offender but before the second or third tranche of money has moved. Pig-butchering exploits time as a weapon, building the false relationship over weeks or months before the larger deposits begin. Shrinking that window through proactive notification is a textbook situational crime prevention measure. The $562 million number is not “money recovered.” It is harm prevented – a category criminology has historically struggled to measure but which matters more for victim welfare than recovery does.

Meta Removes 150,000 Scam Accounts

In response to scam compound infrastructure, Meta has removed more than 150,000 accounts linked to organised fraud activities, according to industry analysis published this week. The accounts were used to manage scripts, coordinate victim outreach, and reuse infrastructure across campaigns. This follows growing pressure from US, UK, and Australian regulators on platform accountability for scam advertising and impersonation.

The 150,000 number sounds large. It needs to be read against a denominator. A separate Reuters investigation referenced earlier this year estimated that Meta delivered approximately 15 billion scam ads per day. Removal at the account level is necessary but not sufficient. The structural question is whether platform business models, which monetise reach and engagement, can ever be aligned with effective fraud prevention without external regulatory pressure. The evidence to date is that they cannot. Self-regulation at platform scale produces takedown theatre, sustained reduction requires legal liability.

Cambodia Closes 190 Scam Centres, Deports 11,000 Workers

Cambodia announced that it has closed approximately 190 scam centres and arrested 173 senior crime figures since the start of its post-Chen Zhi crackdown. 11,000 workers have been deported. The scale of the operation, and the rare press access provided to Kampot province compounds indicate a substantive (if politically motivated) domestic posture shift.

But the structural problem the Cambodian authorities themselves describe is striking. Kampot’s police chief told Reuters:

“We have approximately 1,000 police officers in the entire province, along with about 300 military police. Even combining both forces, we were unable to stop them as there were around 6,000 to 7,000 individuals who left this location.”

This is the displacement trajectory in real time. Workers are being deported, but the criminal capital, the financiers, the casino licences, the patronage relationships, remains. Without action against the patronage layer (which OFAC began last week with the Kok An sanctions, covered in Lab Report #3), compound infrastructure will reconstitute — often within months, often in the same provinces.

Operation Henhouse: 557 UK Fraud Arrests, £27.1 Million Disrupted

Although announced in late March, the final results of Operation Henhouse 2026, coordinated by the National Economic Crime Centre and the City of London Police, continue to be processed through the courts this week, with significant onward referrals to financial institutions and platform providers. The headline figures: 557 arrests, 172 voluntary interviews, 249 cease-and-desist notices, account freezing orders against £9 million, and seizures of cash and assets worth £18.1 million. Six offshore fraud call centres were identified, with 283 numbers and 6.5 million calls blocked.

What is criminologically interesting here is the scaling of telecoms-level disruption. Blocking 6.5 million scam calls represents an estimated £2.1 million in losses prevented, but also a meaningful test of the network-level intervention model that the new UK Online Crime Centre is built on. Henhouse demonstrates that the model works in pilot form. The Online Crime Centre’s task is to make it work permanently, at scale, and across all major UK telecoms operators simultaneously. Whether the centre’s first-year metrics replicate the Henhouse cost-benefit ratio will determine whether the £250 million Fraud Strategy investment was correctly priced.

EU AML Update: Eurojust Dismantles €2 Billion Laundering Network

Authorities in Italy, Latvia, and Lithuania have arrested 18 individuals suspected of laundering €2 billion through an electronic money institution (EMI) operating out of the Baltics. Eurojust’s statement describes the EMI as offering “money laundering as a service” to thousands of drug traffickers, fraudsters, and other criminals – routing proceeds through a network of shell companies. Available indications point to Trustcom Financial, an EMI based in Vilnius until it lost its licence two years ago following a money-laundering investigation against two of its directors. €11.5 million in assets have been frozen.

This is a structurally important case. EMIs occupy a regulatory category designed to support fintech innovation and payment competition, but the licensing regime in some smaller member states has historically operated with weaker substantive supervision than the equivalent banking regime. Trustcom’s licence was withdrawn, but the underlying scheme continued. The case is a textbook illustration of the regulatory arbitrage problem that AMLA’s direct supervisory authority is designed to solve from 2028. Until then, criminal infrastructure built on regulatory inconsistency between member states will continue to find the path of least resistance.

Treasury and Federal Banking Agencies: AML Reform Comments Open

The full FinCEN/OCC/FDIC/NCUA AML reform package has now been published in the Federal Register, with comments due 60 days from publication. Beyond the doctrinal shift toward outcomes-based effectiveness already discussed in earlier editions, the proposal includes two mechanically important changes: a new consultation framework requiring FinCEN sign-off on certain Agency enforcement actions, and clarification that only “significant or systemic” failures to implement properly established programmes warrant enforcement action.

The latter change is what compliance lawyers will be focused on. The current regime has produced a generation of enforcement actions for technical or administrative failures that did not produce identifiable money-laundering harm. The new standard formalises a quality-over-quantity test that, in principle, allows institutions to operate intelligently risk-based programmes without facing penalty for documentation gaps. In practice, the test will turn on how supervisors define “significant or systemic.” That is where the next two years of supervisory practice will be decided.

New Research Worth Reading

A particularly important piece this week: Examining Cyber Fraud Victimization Among Chinese Adolescents (Zhou, Lee, Lin & Tiwari, 2026, Crime & Delinquency). Using structural equation modelling on 929 Chinese high school students, this study integrates the general theory of crime, lifestyle–routine activity theory, and online risk-taking. The headline finding: a deviant online lifestyle is the strongest predictor of both fraud targeting and financial loss across both stages. Once online risk-taking is controlled for, low self-control’s direct effect on victimisation becomes non-significant. Paradoxically, non-deviant online routines increase targeting exposure while reducing financial loss, exactly the kind of nuanced finding routine activity theory needs more of.

The Cyprus money mule study, Behind the scenes of financial crime: exploring awareness of money muling in the Cypriot context (Kythreotis, Christofi, Petrou & Soltani, 2026, Journal of Money Laundering Control), finds Cypriot public awareness of money muling to be low, and identifies digital financial literacy and cybersecurity awareness as the main predictors. The study is small (sample-bounded), but the policy implication is consistent with what we see in UK data: targeted interventions on awareness work, but only when delivered through trusted channels at the moment of decision.

Also worth reading: Levi and Lord’s Economic Crime, Economic Criminology, and Serious Crimes for Economic Gain, which I cited last week for the Czech subsidy fraud analysis. The taxonomy it proposes; distinguishing “economic crime,” “economic criminology,” and “serious crimes for economic gain” as conceptually distinct objects of study, is increasingly useful as policy debates conflate the three.

What I Am Watching

• Whether the US–China cooperation extends beyond pig-butchering. If the bilateral framework expands to cover IP theft, sanctions evasion, or trade-based money laundering, that will be the genuinely consequential story of 2026. (DOJ announcement via Hacker News)
• AMLA’s first published consultation outputs, due in the next quarter. The shape of EU-wide CDD rules will determine whether the 2028 supervisory framework can actually constrain regulatory arbitrage between member states. (KYC360 AML roundup)
• Operation Level Up’s victim-notification metrics as they evolve. If the $562 million figure scales with the number of victims notified, this becomes the enforcement model other jurisdictions copy. (DOJ announcement)
• Trustcom Financial successor entities. EMI licensing regimes typically allow rapid reconstitution of similar operations under different ownership. Watch for follow-on enforcement actions in Latvia and Lithuania over the next six months. (ACAMS report)
• Comments on the AML/CFT NPRM — particularly from large banks on the “significant or systemic” enforcement threshold. The supervisory practice that emerges will define US AML enforcement for the next decade. (FDIC press release)