by Amanda Head
Discussions at the East Room roundtable focused on directing reviews of tools against transnational criminal organizations running scam centers, phishing campaigns, ransomware, impersonation, and sextortion.
U.S presidents have for years issued cybersecurity directives and formed inter-agency task forces, yet the steady drain of American savings to online scams and fraud has only accelerated.
President Donald Trump is now treating the everyday financial harm from transnational scam networks as a top priority that directly hits families.
GOP Sen. Rick Scott, who chairs the Senate's Special Committee on Aging, told Just the News, "We've been having hearings on this. It's disgusting what goes on in some of these countries, how they target especially our seniors, and they take billions away from them."
The Florida senator continued: "I'm glad the president's focused on this. I know the FBI has been very focused on it. So finally, we have a president . . .if you think about what this guy's doing, he is trying to solve the problems. We have a lot of problems. There's been a lot of appeasement by past presidents, but he is out there trying to solve the problems to take care of you."
Trump convened a White House roundtable Wednesday on cybercrime, online fraud and predatory schemes targeting U.S. citizens.
Participants included Attorney General Todd Blanche, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, and Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, along with other officials from the Justice Department, Homeland Security Investigations and related agencies.
“Under the Trump administration, we have marshaled the full force of the federal government to combat this scourge,” the president said. “We have people who do nothing but this, and they are really good at it.”
Discussions focused on implementation of Trump's executive order in March directing reviews of tools against transnational criminal organizations running scam centers, phishing campaigns, ransomware, impersonation, and sextortion.
Officials highlighted the freezing of roughly $1 billion in cybercurrency tied to foreign scammers, the prevention of an estimated $1.6 billion in losses, and coordinated international actions such as an FBI-Dubai operation that produced hundreds of arrests and the dismantling of multiple scam compounds, according to remarks at the event and White House statements.
Trump stressed victim support, especially for seniors, and efforts to recover stolen funds through the DOJ, FBI and private-sector partnerships under a memorandum in August expanding disruption capabilities.
The advent of the internet brought new opportunities for scammers
Online scams have expanded with the internet.
The FBI launched the Internet Fraud Complaint Center in May 2000 to collect reports of auction fraud, non-delivery schemes, and advance-fee letters that dominated early e-commerce, renaming it the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2002.
Over the following decades, the center logged millions of complaints as threats matured into business email compromises, romance scams, ransomware and cryptocurrency investment frauds, according to FBI accounts of IC3’s history.
Transnational groups operating from compounds in Southeast Asia and elsewhere scaled operations with forced labor and social engineering, while artificial intelligence has recently enabled voice cloning and deepfakes that complicate detection. IC3 annual reports document consistent year-over-year rises in complaint volume and reported losses as daily life moved online.
Other presidents' attempts to tackle the growing issue
Prior administrations largely framed cybersecurity as a national-security and critical-infrastructure issue rather than a direct consumer-fraud problem.
President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13694 in 2015 authorizing sanctions against significant malicious cyber actors, primarily aimed at state-sponsored threats.
The Biden administration issued multiple orders, including a late-term directive promoting digital-identity tools and secure software practices for federal systems, while earlier efforts concentrated on ransomware defenses and government-network resilience.
Consumer agencies issued warnings and pursued cases, and the FBI expanded IC3 reporting. Yet reported losses continued climbing with limited sustained disruption of overseas scam centers. The practical financial harm to seniors and working families received less consistent prioritization than infrastructure protection.
The exploding scope and cost
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received 1,008,597 complaints in 2025 detailing nearly $21 billion in reported losses, a 26% increase from 2024, according to the bureau’s 2025 Internet Crime Report.
Americans over 60 accounted for about $7.7 billion of those losses. Investment fraud, frequently involving cryptocurrency, produced the largest share at roughly $8.6 billion, followed by business email compromise.
The Consumer Federation of America estimates the true annual cost, adjusting for underreporting, exceeds $148 billion, or about $1,009 per U.S. household.
Cryptocurrency-related complaints alone exceeded $11 billion in reported losses, and AI-enabled schemes generated nearly $893 million in their first year of separate tracking.
Amanda Head is White House Correspondent for Just the News. You can follow her here.
Source: https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/after-years-limited-action-trump-places-billions-losses-americans-center
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