The U.S. government took a major swing at international cybercrime today, dangling a massive financial carrot to help dismantle a multi-billion-dollar scam industry. The Department of State announced a reward of up to $4 million for any information that leads to the arrest of Daren Li, a fugitive convicted of laundering tens of millions of dollars for Southeast Asian scam rings.
Li, a dual citizen of China and St. Kitts and Nevis, had previously been convicted and sentenced in a California federal court but managed to slip away.
Court records show he admitted to helping move money for “pig butchering” and cryptocurrency scams, using a network of U.S. shell companies and bank accounts to hide the trail. According to his own admissions, at least $73.6 million in victim funds flowed through accounts linked to him and his partners.
The heat isn’t just on Li. A second, even larger reward of up to $10 million is now on the table for information leading to the seizure of funds tied to the “Tai Chang” scam compounds located in Burma’s Karen State. These compounds—specifically identified by the government as Tai Chang 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0—are essentially fortified factories for digital fraud.
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This move comes at a critical time. U.S. government estimates show that Americans lost a staggering $7.2 billion in 2025 alone to these Southeast Asia-based operations. These organizations often rely on human trafficking to staff their centers, using apps like Telegram to lure people into forced labor.
“Transnational criminal organizations based in Southeast Asia are increasingly targeting Americans through large-scale cyber scam operations,” the Department of the Treasury noted in a briefing today.
The rewards are part of a broader, multi-agency crackdown. Parallel to the bounty announcement, the Department of Justice filed charges against two Chinese nationals for running similar compounds and shut down over 500 fraudulent web domains.
Simultaneously, the Treasury Department slapped sanctions on Kok An, a Cambodian senator accused of controlling several scam compounds, along with 28 people and entities in his orbit.
By targeting the money—specifically the cryptocurrency assets these groups use to bypass traditional banking—federal investigators hope to break the financial back of the Tai Chang network.
For now, the hunt for Daren Li and the billions lost to the Karen State compounds remains a top priority for the State Department’s Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program.
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$14 Million Bounty: U.S. Goes After Fugitive Money Launderer, Massive Burma Scam Centers
