Erin West spent 26 years as a prosecutor. Her final three were devoted solely to pig-butchering cases. Now, as founder and president of Operation Shamrock, she’s pushing law enforcement and financial institutions to change how they see the problem. Her pitch: aggregate scam data and go after the shared infrastructure scam operations depend on, instead of investigating one victim and one case at a time.
West describes scam compounds in Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia as functioning less like criminal gangs and more like industrial parks. A single organized crime syndicate controls the building. Inside it, dozens of separate “companies” operate independently, each specializing in a different victim population. When one branch or country’s police shuts down a location, the others keep running. The systems built to fight fraud are structured the wrong way for this, she argues: a bank looks at one suspicious wire, a platform flags one fake profile, a local detective works one victim’s case. That’s exactly the level scam operations have outgrown. Her answer is to attack the dependencies instead, the phone numbers, social accounts, messaging apps, bank accounts, and crypto rails every operation needs to function, regardless of which “company” inside the compound is running a given scheme.
New PYMNTS Intelligence data backs the case for that shift. In July 2026, 21% of U.S. consumers, an estimated 57 million people, said they’d been the victim of a scam within the past five years. The figure comes from a survey of 9,524 U.S. consumers conducted for “Fraud’s Loyalty Tax: How Scams Cost Banks Their Customers.” The average loss among victims was $9,734. Half lost $404 or less, but 1.1% lost $250,000 or more. Reporting behavior varies sharply by channel. Victims who reported to their financial institution recovered all their money 42% of the time. That compares with just 20% for those who reported through other channels, such as police or federal portals. Among victims who recovered anything at all, 79% got it back through their bank.
Fraud also remains badly underreported. The share of victims who didn’t report a scam at all grew 26% in the past year, to 11%, most commonly because they didn’t know reporting was an option. That gap is West’s real obstacle. Without more data, banks and law enforcement can’t see the shared infrastructure behind seemingly unrelated cases. A single victim’s transaction and platform records, aggregated with enough other cases, can reveal the businesses, money routes, and bad actors that keep resurfacing. That’s what gives investigators a path to disrupt the network, rather than chasing one node at a time.
For payments and fraud teams, the interview points to one specific lesson and one broader one. Encouraging victims to report to their bank first, rather than solely to police or federal portals, correlates with meaningfully higher recovery rates. More broadly, giving banks better tools and incentives to aggregate and share fraud-pattern data could pay off well beyond any single case.
Source: PYMNTS