US declares 'cyber warfare' on scam centres as seniors lose $7.7 bn

Washington: The Trump administration is, for the first time, turning offensive cyber weapons on foreign scam centres, top officials have said, as Homeland Security disclosed that Americans over 60 lost $7.7 billion to cybercrime in 2025 and the Secret Service reported recovering thousands of child abuse videos.

“With the executive order that you signed, for the first time ever, we are using offensive cyber capabilities to dismantle, disrupt, and disable these foreign scam centres. That has never been done before,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told President Donald Trump at a White House roundtable on cybercrime and scams on Wednesday.

“So you have effectively declared cyber warfare against the cyber criminals, and that is saving the pensions, the life savings, the retirement accounts, the earnings of countless American citizens,” Miller said.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the department brought “CyberCom and NSA, and the exquisite capabilities” to the effort. “We’re feeding our deep intelligence and tracking data on overseas cyber networks directly to the National Coordination Center and Homeland Security Task Force,” he said.

“We’ve also seen there’s a very clear connection between transnational cyber syndicates and enemy militaries and how they fund themselves,” Hegseth said, without naming any country.

Trump said his August national security memorandum unleashed private sector “tools and resources” to “undertake offensive and defensive actions to stop the hackers”. Officials did not say which scam centres had been hit or where.

Miller cast the campaign alongside Trump’s trade agenda, speaking of “entire foreign economies that are propped up on stealing from American seniors”. “America is not a pile of treasure for other countries and other people and other scammers all around the world to loot for themselves,” he said.

Older Americans were described as the main targets. “When you get into what is going on, the elderly population, over 60, as just in 2025 through cybercrimes, lost 7.7 billion in their income,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said. “That’s retirements that are completely wiped away.”

Miller described the “grandparent scam”. “Your grandmother, your grandfather, your parents, they get a phone call saying a loved one has been arrested, wired $10,000 right away to get them out of jail, except nobody was arrested, nobody’s in jail, and the money goes to a foreign scam centre,” he said.

“We want to protect our seniors because the seniors almost more than anybody are really victims of what we’re talking about today,” Trump said. He advised victims to “seek out help from trusted family members”.

Mullin also detailed action against online child exploitation. “Underneath Secret Service alone, they have recovered 14,600 child abuse videos, as the First Lady has so eloquently said, take it down, and over 35,600 images,” he said.

He highlighted the Homeland Security Investigations campaign “Know to Protect”, which he said was “educating families on how to protect themselves from digital extortion”.

“Behind every statistic is a human life,” Mullin said.

Trump said the administration was “aggressively confronting the sexual extortion rackets that have wrecked the lives of too many young people, and in some cases even tragically led victims to take their own lives”. He credited First Lady Melania Trump, “who led a successful bipartisan effort to pass the Take It Down Act”.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said: “We’re also meeting the serious threat of sextortion head-on.”

“By taking on these cyber criminals on offence and defence, we watch out for our warriors, we watch out for American citizens, and we secure the homeland,” Hegseth said.

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