US Treasury wants banks to be better at filing cyber scam reports after
noting nearly $13 billion in losses since 2023

Date:
Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:10:00 +0000

Description:
However the number counts flagged bank filings, not stolen money, and only 1,300 institutions bothered filing at all.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The US Treasury's FinCEN arm asks financial institutions to file scam center suspicious activity reports under a new keyword FinCEN says that it flagged financial moves across 33,904 different filings, but actual losses might differ significantly, as the approach is prone to double-counting transactions Only 1,300 institutions filed reports, with 10,082 (29.7%) of them centering around exploitation of the elderly by scammers The US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement
Network has issuespublished an alert and a companion data analysis telling banks, credit unions, digital asset exchanges, and securities firms that it needs sharper reporting on the overseas scam centers that it says target Americans at an industrial scale.

FinCEN puts total damages, per its reporting mechanism, at roughly $12.7 billion linked to suspected digital asset investment scams between September 2023 and the end of 2025. The number comes from adding up the dollar values
of 33,904 Bank Secrecy Act filings that referenced the keyword from its 2023 "pig butchering" alert , which may be overstated, as it includes both attempted and successful transactions as well as both inbound and outbound reports, often of the same transactions, causing significant overlap. Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here: FinCEN's new requirement is a keyword While the $12.7 billion is a measure of what institutions have
flagged and is prone to double-counting and errors, victim losses, a significant chunk of which go unreported, may be considerably higher.

This has prompted Gene Lange, who effectively works as the Under Secretary
for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, to call these scams "one of the
most significant fraud threats facing Americans today." You may like US Treasury wants banks to be better at filing file cyber scam reports after noting nearly $13 billion in losses since 2023 Cybercrime is officially costing the world trillions every year Security experts warn of AI-boosted scam campaigns that can trick even the smartest victims

It has also prompted a new suspicious activity report keyword: "FIN-2026-SCAMCENTERS," which institutions are expected to use to indicate that a scam center is potentially involved.

FinCEN also wants chat logs, scammer phone numbers, social media handles, wallet addresses, transaction hashes, and the URLs victims were told to deposit into, filed in the structured cyber indicator fields rather than left out. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. Institutions to volunteer more information to stop scams The move is part of its push to have institutions volunteer more information under the US Patriot Act, as it aims to confront what is a
growing intelligence problem: scammers tend to route victims through several institutions in sequence; most filers see only one slice of a scam's
lifecycle and often have difficulty tracing it all the way.

For example, a crypto exchange might see a customer buying USDT and sending
it off-platform, a bank might see a wire to that exchange, and a brokerage might see a retirement account liquidated. None of them would have the bigger picture of what essentially happened or what triggered the transaction.

Combined, with properly linked information, it makes it much easier to identify a potential scam; separately, these incidents can inflate the number of reports, which often aren't linked, and investigations can lack insight into the origin or final destination of the funds.

FinCEN's Rapid Response Program has interdicted $1.8 billion and recovered just over $1 billion for 5,790 US victims since 2015, which, against the flagged totals, is a very limited recovery at best compared with the actual funds at stake. This highlights a larger fundamental problem : institutions mostly detect these schemes after the money is gone, and reporting them correctly and thoroughly may yield limited dividends at best against an industry that has morphed, relatively unchecked, into a multi-billion-dollar juggernaut. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/us-treasury-wants-banks-to-be-better-at -filing-cyber-scam-reports-after-noting-nearly-usd13-billion-in-losses-since-2 023


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