US-UK Scam Pact Lands After $8.65bn Crypto Fraud Year

$8.65 billion is what Americans reported losing to cyber-enabled investment fraud in 2025, 89% more than the $4.57 billion reported in 2023, according to Justice Department figures. That jump is why prosecutors in Washington and London have signed the first cross-border agreement written specifically to pull apart the scam compounds behind the money.

Three agencies signed one page at an ambassador's residence

The Justice Department said on Thursday that the US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, the Crown Prosecution Service of England and Wales and the UK's National Crime Agency had signed a memorandum of understanding linking the American Scam Center Strike Force to its British counterparts. It was signed by US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro, Crown Prosecutor Stephen Parkinson and NCA Director General Graeme Biggar at the Washington residence of the British ambassador, Sir Christian Turner. The DOJ called it the first international agreement of its kind aimed at disabling scam centres running cryptocurrency and cyber-enabled investment fraud.

What does the paper actually do? Three things: parallel investigations into shared targets, an information channel on organised crime syndicates, and a process for settling which country prosecutes whom. Cointelegraph reported that authorities have already found overlapping cases in both jurisdictions.

An MOU isn't a treaty. Nobody gets extradited because of it.

But jurisdiction is the part that usually kills these cases. A syndicate registered in one country, running compounds in a second, laundering through a third and cashing out through exchanges in a fourth falls between prosecutors rather than into their hands. Pirro reached for wartime language, saying the two countries now "stand together in the war on transnational organized crime."

The loss figures don't agree, and the gap is instructive

Three numbers are circulating and they measure different things. The DOJ puts the damage to Americans at roughly $10 billion a year. The $8.65 billion comes from complaints filed with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, IC3, and covers cyber-enabled investment fraud broadly, while the IC3's 2025 annual report, covered in April by Help Net Security, counted $11.3 billion in crypto-linked losses, $7.2 billion of it from investment scams using crypto.

So which is right? All of them, for different baskets. Each is a floor rather than a ceiling: these are reported losses only, and shame keeps most victims quiet.

London hosts the first live test in October

The two sides plan an in-person disruption operation with private-sector partners in London in early October, according to the DOJ. The format has a track record. In March the NCA hosted a week-long action codenamed Operation Atlantic with the US Secret Service, Canadian police and private firms, identifying more than 20,000 victims across three countries and freezing over $12 million. One British victim in it is thought to have lost more than £52,000.

Private-sector partners means exchanges, blockchain analytics firms and banks. They hold the data. Police hold the warrants, and putting both in a room for a week means freezing orders can land before a wallet empties, which is the only window that matters in crypto recovery.

London is a sensible venue for another reason. The city is absorbing digital-crime damage unrelated to compounds: Westminster City Council and Kensington and Chelsea have been unable to process local authority searches since November after a criminal cyber attack, holding up thousands of home sales in two of Britain's richest boroughs, Bloomberg reported in January. Compare London's crime rate with the rest of the UK using street-crime tables and you're measuring the wrong thing. The losses that empty a household arrive by message now.

Who gains from this pact, and who still eats the loss

Retail investors gain a better chance of a freeze, not a refund. That distinction is where the disappointment in this field comes from. Take the Prince Group case: the DOJ seized bitcoin then valued at about $15 billion in October 2025, the largest forfeiture in American history, and by March the ICIJ was reporting open questions over which victims are entitled to any of it. Founder Chen Zhi was arrested and sent to China in January.

Banks and payment firms are the quiet winners. UK Finance's 2026 fraud report showed authorised push payment losses of £576.4 million with investment fraud up 40%, and under UK reimbursement rules much of that lands on the industry, not the customer. Every compound taken offline is a claim never filed. Exchanges gain too: a strike force that treats them as partners isn't treating them as defendants.

The losers are the middlemen: nominee-account networks, small over-the-counter desks and the processors sitting between a victim's transfer and a compound in Southeast Asia. That's the layer both jurisdictions can actually reach.

Is there a catch? Every enforcement figure here is dwarfed by the loss figure. $12 million frozen against $8.65 billion reported is a rounding error, and the honest read is that this alliance is plumbing for cases charged in 2027 and 2028, not a rescue of anyone's savings this quarter.

Four dates that will show whether this works

• Early October 2026: the joint disruption operation with private-sector partners in London, the MOU's first real output.
• November 2026: one year since Pirro created the Scam Center Strike Force, when its first indictments should surface.
• Spring 2027: the FBI's next IC3 report, showing whether the 89% rise has flattened.
• Mid-2027: UK Finance's next fraud report, the cleanest read on British investment fraud losses.

Watch the October operation for one thing: whether a freeze figure gets published at all. Operation Atlantic produced numbers within weeks. Silence would say this pact is still a document rather than a machine.