Getting scammed should not come with a second assignment: learn the organisational chart of the United States government.

Yet a report released Tuesday by the Joint Economic Committee's ranking Democrats, Senator Maggie Hassan and Representative Don Beyer, finds a fragmented federal response to overseas scam operations. According to AP's reporting, the government lacks a unified accounting of how much money it has seized from those compounds or returned to victims.

The criminals have coordinated operations. The government has several promising totals that would like to remain in their own departments.

This is not a claim that nobody is recovering money. The FBI told the committee it returned $336 million to scam victims in 2025. The FTC reported $1.83 billion returned to fraud victims in fiscal 2025, but couldn't identify how much involved overseas compounds. The Secret Service reported more than $770 million across two fiscal years and multiple types of fraud.

Do not add those figures into a triumphant recovery percentage. They cover different periods and categories. The problem is precisely that a collection of impressive numbers is not yet an answer to the same question.

For someone whose savings have disappeared, the useful number is what comes back. A press release about an asset seizure is not a deposit.

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The report calls for a unified federal strategy and a central place for victims to report losses and seek assistance. The White House also supports greater coordination. That is worth noting: the proposed improvement is not a partisan demand that one agency learn to levitate. It is that agencies confronting the same sprawling problem produce a response people can navigate.

There is also a prevention question. AP reports that Justice Department officials urged more action from private-sector companies, while American regulators and lawmakers have not created clear incentives requiring those companies to do more. The report describes public-private cooperation as fragmented and voluntary.

“Please help” is a starting point for cooperation. It is a less convincing substitute for policy when the companies involved supply the communications, financial services or technology through which scams operate. The government's job includes deciding what responsibility those businesses should carry, not merely hoping responsibility appears as a product update.

The State Department says it has the tools it needs to fight the threat abroad and has 60 employees in the U.S. and Asia dedicating significant time to it. The report nevertheless raises concern about cutbacks, including the elimination of an anti-scam training programme in Bangladesh. Those are competing assessments, not proof that every federal effort has stopped.

None of this makes victims foolish. These operations are built to deceive people. The sensible response is prevention, usable help and a recoveries system that measures what reaches them.

A person who has already lost money should not also have to find the government.