FBI Director Kash Patel says Operation Blackout has seized roughly $17 billion from overseas scam compounds that prey on American seniors and run like forced-labor towns.
Those compounds are not shadowy call centers tucked in a back room. Patel told Fox News Digital they are sprawling sites across Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and the FBI is expanding its global hunt as the networks shift ground.
“These are towns, these are cities,” Patel said. “These are actual villages with structures where they force people into forced labor.” The majority of the victims, he added, are senior citizens in America.
Operation Blackout pairs overseas raids and asset seizures with efforts to cut the networks’ communications, free trafficked workers, and return stolen money. The domestic side, Operation Level Up, works with the U.S. Secret Service to find potential cryptocurrency-investment scam victims before the losses land.
“Unfortunately, the majority of the targets are senior citizens in America,” Patel said. The schemes often start with a social-media contact, a phone call, a text, or a Telegram message. A fake friendship or romance follows. Then comes the pitch to a fraudulent cryptocurrency platform.
One victim, 71, thanked investigators for the outreach: “At 71 years old, I'm old enough to know that people my age are certainly often targeted because of our unfamiliarity with certain new technologies. Thanks so much for looking out for us.”
Another wrote: “I watched my grandmother lose her life savings to scammers and I would love to see them all be put away.”
Those notes are not outliers. Under Operation Level Up, the FBI says it has notified 10,406 victims. An estimated $660 million in losses was prevented. Seventy-seven percent of the people contacted did not know they were being scammed. Ninety-nine victims were referred for suicide intervention.
Agents also seized or froze $122 million in cryptocurrency, took down 584 scam websites, and sent 7,670 scam accounts to private-sector companies for action.
Patel’s description of the overseas sites is blunt. “Our initiative, Operation Blackout, is to prevent, disrupt, and dismantle,” he said. The work has already reached major compounds and produced large evidence hauls.
In August, authorities hit Cambodia’s O’Smach Resort scam compound, a site of roughly 200 acres. Teams searched 28 buildings over three days and seized 113 hard drives, 15 computers, and 35 boxes of evidence.
In September, a DOJ Scam Center Strike Force team that included FBI Honolulu personnel helped Madagascar authorities take down 13 scam centers run by Chinese organized crime syndicates. More than 3,200 electronic devices were processed.
Photo captions tied to the coverage also point to the Thailand-Myanmar border area around KK Park in Myawaddy, Myanmar, where victims were left in limbo after a multinational crackdown, and to compounds described as fraud factories and human-trafficking hubs operated by criminal gangs, including the Karen Border Guard Force.
As pressure rises in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the operators are moving. Patel said the migration is already visible.
“That’s why you’re seeing the migration of these scam compounds to central and sub-Saharan Africa, which is where we are already pre-positioned to take them off,” he said.
That posture matters. These networks do not stop when one compound falls. They relocate, rebuild, and keep fishing for the same American retirees who built savings over a lifetime of work.
The FBI’s answer, as Patel framed it, is not a single raid. It is a sustained campaign: identify the compounds, disrupt the money and the messaging, dismantle the sites, and get out ahead of the next move.
Roughly $17 billion seized under Operation Blackout is the scale figure the bureau is putting on the table. The human scale sits in the victim counts, the suicide referrals, and the grandparents who never saw the fraud coming until a stranger on a phone had already emptied the account.
Lawful Americans should not have to outwit industrial fraud factories half a world away just to keep the money they earned. When the FBI treats those compounds as the cities they are, and keeps chasing them into the next continent, that is government doing the job taxpayers fund it to do.
