US and UK based investigators have opened a new chapter in the fight against industrial-scale cryptocurrency fraud. On September 3, 2026, officials from both countries signed a first-of-its-kind memorandum of understanding that commits them to pursue the overseas compounds behind investment and romance scams that drain billions from victims each year.
The pact links the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia with the Crown Prosecution Service of England and Wales and the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency.
US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro signed for Washington. Stephen Parkinson signed for the Crown Prosecution Service, and Graeme Biggar signed for the National Crime Agency.
The ceremony was held at the residence of Britain’s ambassador to the United States.
The agreement is designed to turn two separate national campaigns into a single, coordinated effort.
Investigators will run parallel inquiries into the same targets, exchange intelligence on syndicate structure and money flows, and decide together which country is best placed to bring charges.
Officials say they have already found substantial overlap in existing cases.
A joint disruption session with private-sector partners is scheduled in London in early October, hosted by the National Crime Agency.
The immediate focus is the network of scam compounds concentrated in Southeast Asia.
Authorities describe these sites as factories of fraud, often tied to Chinese organized crime and to the trafficking of workers who are forced to run schemes.
Typical operations include so-called pig-butchering cons: long-term relationship-building on messaging apps followed by fake trading platforms that display fabricated profits until victims try to withdraw funds.
The financial harm is large and rising.
US officials estimate that scam-center schemes cost Americans about $10 billion a year.
Reported losses from cryptocurrency investment fraud logged with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center climbed 89 percent from $4.57 billion in 2023 to $8.65 billion in 2025.
Prosecutors add that the true figure is almost certainly higher because many victims never file a complaint.
The new memorandum expands the Scam Center Strike Force that Pirro launched in November 2025.
That unit already works with the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, the FBI, the Secret Service, and other agencies to freeze assets, seize websites, and charge operators.
Earlier actions have included sanctions and a massive bitcoin forfeiture tied to the Prince Group, a network accused of laundering proceeds from these compounds.
Pirro has framed the partnership in stark terms, calling it an alliance against transnational crime and saying the two countries will work to disable the networks that steal from ordinary citizens while exploiting trafficked labor.
British counterparts have separately pressed Five Eyes partners for faster intelligence sharing and coordinated action against the accounts, platforms, and payment channels that keep the industry running.
The practical test will come quickly.
Parallel investigations, shared targeting, and an October meeting with industry are meant to convert diplomatic language into concrete disruption.
Whether that combination can shrink a borderless, highly adaptive criminal market remains an open question. What is no longer in doubt is that Washington and London have chosen to treat the compounds as a shared enforcement problem rather than two separate caseloads.