Jakarta. Indonesia has blocked over 557,000 bank accounts associated with scams, according to the Financial Services Authority (OJK), as the country wages war on fraud.

From Nov. 2024 to June 2026, victims nationwide have reported 608,168 scammers’ bank accounts to OJK's anti-scam center IASC. As many as 557,751 accounts now have their access cut off. These blocked accounts manage around Rp 674.1 billion ($37.5 million). Authorities have returned about Rp 196.93 billion ($10.9 million) of that stolen money to the victims.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg. Not all victims have filed reports when they get scammed,” OJK chair Friderica Widyasari Dewi said in Jakarta on Monday, as reported by the state news agency Antara.

Friderica went on to say that many victims are reluctant to report out of embarrassment. In other words, there may be even more scam cases out there than actually reported. There are also possibilities that scammers might have split the money into separate accounts or even transferred the cash abroad, thus further slimming the chances of funds recovery.

A report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated financial losses of up to $37 billion from scams targeting victims in East and Southeast Asia in 2023 alone. A high proportion of these losses came from organized groups based in Southeast Asia.

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