Senators from both parties Thursday probed Trump administration officials about whether federal agencies and foreign governments are coordinated enough in the battle against scammers, something witnesses told the Foreign Relations Committee they were working to remedy.

At least 13 federal agencies have authorities to counter scams, raising questions about whether someone needs to be in charge of all those efforts. And while there was some bipartisan sentiment at Thursday’s hearing that the Trump administration has taken good actions to battle scammers, both lawmakers and administration officials said that scam operations have demonstrated that cracking down on them in one place often just leads to them going elsewhere.

Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., compared the situation to an international initiative that gained prominence in the 1990s to counter drug trafficking, Joint Interagency Task Force South.

“Given that today’s scam centers are similarly transnational, combining cybercrime, human trafficking, money laundering and cryptocurrency, has the threat reached the point that we should establish a comparable multinational coordination mechanism?” he asked.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., focused on federal coordination: She paraphrased a former federal official who said, “there is nobody that is heading that effort up across agencies. We need to treat this like combat, and so we need somebody in charge.”

Shaheen, the top Democrat on the panel, is a co-sponsor of the bipartisan Scam Compound Accountability and Mobilization (SCAM) Act, which seeks to unify federal efforts on the subject.

A State Department official told Shaeen scammers were a national security priority for President Donald Trump, and that his executive order on the topic sought to tackle coordination.

“I do understand that this is a whole-of-government approach, and many agencies are focused on this,” said David Bedard, deputy assistant secretary at State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs “The Action plan that was directed by the president is currently in the interagency review process to deconflict some of the concerns that you have raised. We certainly think the task force that will be implanted through the executive order will solve the problems you might be referencing.”

There’s also an international plan under the task force, he said. Currently, the administration shares intelligence on scammers with foreign allies, and Interpol has “productive” channels to work through there and is setting up its own task force, Bedard said, but there are concerns about other countries taking similar, duplicative action.

There have been signs of progress on the international front, Bedard and another State Department witness told the panel.

Michael DeSombre, assistant secretary at the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said Trump has raised the subject with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and that China has used its influence in Asia as its own citizens have become scam victims. Still, there’s been more progress in countries where the United States has stronger relations, such as Cambodia, than in those where ties aren’t as close, like Burma and Laos.

In Cambodia, one key has been pursuing scam center bosses first and foremost, Bedard said.

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The Trump administration’s haphazard and opaque interventions into artificial intelligence security matters could catapult Chinese alternatives into broader acceptance, posing new security risks altogether, a group of Democratic senators wrote to top administration officials Monday.

The five senators said that the administration’s handling has alternated between too passive, such as when OpenAI models escaped testing in the Hugging Face hack last month, and overstepping, such as when the Commerce Department suspended access for any foreign national to Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 in June.

“The Administration’s ad hoc and unpredictable approach undermines U.S. competitiveness, heightening market incentives to adopt open weight models from vendors based in the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” wrote Sens. Kristen Gillibrand of New York, Adam Schiff of California, Mark Warner of Virginia, Chris Coons of Delaware and Mark Kelly of Arizona.

In the Hugging Face hack, the senators wrote that “the Federal Government cannot be passive as these capabilities emerge.”

In the case of the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 suspensions, the senators said that the administration “utilized an infrequently used authority to direct Anthropic to suspend all access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals (including foreign national employees inside the United States) citing an undisclosed national security concern later described as a narrow jailbreak finding.”

Because Anthropic couldn’t immediately assess users’ nationality, the firm had to disable both models for everyone. The administration and Anthropic negotiated for 18 days behind closed doors before reaching an agreement, the lawmakers complained.

“While the Administration may have been responding to real security concerns to protect the United States, even justifiable interventions can create broader harm if the standards and decision-making processes are opaque, ad hoc, or unpredictable,” they said in their letter to leaders in the White House, Office of the National Cyber Director and departments of State, Treasury and Commerce. “Moreover, when the Executive Branch exercises authority delegated from Congress, such as in the conduct of export control administration, it is essential that it keep Congress fully apprised of its actions and procedures.”

During the time Anthropic was under export controls, the stock price of “an entity-listed Chinese lab” nearly doubled, the senators said. And while Hugging Face was breached, the company “had to” rely on a Chinese open-weight model due to guardrails on U.S. frontier models.

“If American models are perceived as subject to sudden access disruptions based on a black-box U.S. Government process, or as unreliable because U.S. AI labs are overcorrecting in the face of this black-box process, companies and governments in the United States and abroad may hedge by adopting Chinese or other foreign models instead,” the senators contended. “That outcome would undermine U.S. technological leadership while increasing exposure to systems that may carry risks of PRC or otherwise directed censorship, espionage, IP theft, and other supply chain security risks.”

Their letter asked for answers to questions about the standards the administration uses to determine the national security risks a frontier model presents, what legal authorities it will use to invoke restrictions, which agencies are responsible for which decisions and more.

None of the offices or departments the letter was addressed to immediately responded to a request for comment.

The letter follows inquiries at the state level, where 15 attorneys general asked OpenAI for more information regarding the security incident at Hugging Face.

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The State Department will restrict visas for cybercriminals like scammers to sextortionists, and in some cases even their family members, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday.

The Trump administration has sought to make a crackdown on foreign-based scams one of the signature issues of his second term. An executive order that the president signed in March indicated that visa restrictions would be on the table as one response.

“By restricting visa issuance to those who are responsible for or complicit in these criminal enterprises, we are sending a clear message: The United States will go after those who prey on our citizens,” Rubio said.

Other departments have also made efforts to reduce foreign-run scams. In June, the Department of Justice seized infrastructure used by subsidiaries of the Huione Group, a Cambodia-based corporate conglomerate tied to one of the world’s most prolific criminal marketplaces used to commit cyber scams and other crimes.

Rubio authorized the visa restrictions under a 1952 law that gives the State Department the ability to deport or rule as inadmissible someone who poses “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Critics have accused the Trump administration of abusing that provision of the law for political purposes.

Rubio’s statement on the visa restrictions mentions “individuals responsible for, or complicit in, cybercrime and cyber-enabled crime, such as those involved in cyberscams, and sextortion.”  Furthermore, he said, “Immediate family members of individuals engaged in such illicit activities may also be subjected to visa restrictions.”

Betsy Cooper, Founding Director of the Aspen Policy Academy, said the visa restrictions on cybercriminals could be valuable, but offered a caveat.

“Scamming people is a growing global enterprise, and it is a laudable goal to penalize those who scam and defraud people since they so rarely suffer consequences for their actions,” she said in a statement to CyberScoop. “So long as the new visa controls are used narrowly and deployed only against verified scammers and fraudsters, this is a positive step toward combatting cyber-enabled crime.”

While some cyber experts have questioned how much visa restrictions, prosecutions and other punishments of cyber miscreants who are based overseas will affect them, others maintain that it can serve as a deterrent to those who would consider getting into the line of work but want freedom to travel the globe.

FightCyberCrime.org, a nonprofit that seeks to help cybercrime victims, applauded the restrictions on the cybercriminals.

“We welcome efforts to hold cybercriminals accountable across borders. Cryptocurrency investment scams, romance scams, and sextortion cause devastating financial and emotional harm to victims,” it said in a statement to CyberScoop. “Meaningful disruption of these transnational criminal networks is an essential part of the response.”

But there’s still a long way to go in the fight, the statement continued.

“At the same time, we must invest more in victim support, prevention, and recovery resources,” the organization said. “Accountability is critical, but ensuring victims have access to trauma-informed support and resources is equally important.”

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