If you’ve been paying attention to the headlines over the past year, you’ve noticed an uptick in reporting on fraud, particularly in state entitlement programmes like Medicaid and childcare vouchers in Minnesota, Ohio and California, estimated to exceed $100 billion in fraud annually.

When the fraud was exposed by independent journalists, mainstream news organisations swore up and down they’d been reporting on it for a decade. I’ll let the reader judge how seriously to take that. The point is that domestic fraud has been going on for a long time, and that much is in agreement.

Domestic scams are at least easier to catch. International scams are trickier. Massive compounds in South East Asia and Africa – many of them staffed by trafficked workers – exist for the sole purpose of defrauding Westerners. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance estimates these operations steal over $1 trillion annually. Half of Cambodia’s GDP is now tied to scam operations. What we are seeing is the emergence of a global under-economy.

The under-economy is not new. Dickensian England had its own version – the street urchins, the Artful Dodgers and the pickpocketing rings Dickens described. That under-economy developed because of the Industrial Revolution. An explosion in technology radically changed how the nation did business, and it displaced hundreds of thousands of people in a very short time. Families left the farms in the countryside and moved to the cities because that’s where the jobs were. They arrived in places where they had no connections and no community. When you fall outside society, it is much easier to fall into lawlessness.

We are seeing the same thing happen now. Decades ago, we had another explosion of technology – the internet, the global economy, the digital connection of every nation to every other. It displaced hundreds of millions of people, not just within one country but across the world. We shouldn’t be surprised that this has produced exactly what Dickensian England produced: a persistent and organised criminal underclass.

The difference is the scale. The Irish farmer who moved to Manchester in 1850 was displaced within his own state. The displaced today are global. The fraud is also global. It is not popular to say, but these fraud rings are primarily run in so-called Third World countries or by immigrants from those countries. It is unfashionable to enumerate the sins of poor nations. But when their sins harm people, what else are we to do?

As a Church, much of our focus on global economic injustice has been on how wealthy nations harm poor nations through resource extraction. Little time is spent on organised crime from ostensibly poor nations targeting wealthier ones – though, given that half of Cambodia’s GDP comes from scamming the elderly, the word “poor” is doing a lot of work. This failure of the Church is surprising. It is typically the quickest to respond to injustice.

In 1891, in the middle of the Industrial Revolution’s worst dislocations, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum. He named the injustices of the new industrial order and laid out the Catholic response: the dignity of the worker, the duties of capital, the obligations of solidarity. We are at the same moment now, and we need that kind of voice again.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has failed to preach solidarity in both directions. American bishops have spoken often, and rightly, about the obligations of wealthy nations to the poor – welcoming the stranger, caring for the migrant. What has been missing is the reciprocal half: the duties that migrants, developing nations and the global lower class owe to the communities they enter and the systems they participate in.

Solidarity is not one-directional. You cannot defraud Medicaid out of billions of dollars on the grounds that wealthy nations owe you. The people whose Medicaid funds were stolen are not abstract. They are poor and sick Americans, real people in real need.

We need the kind of preaching Pope St John Paul II delivered in 1993, when he stood in Sicily and condemned the Mafia by name, calling its members to repentance from within the very communities that harboured them. American bishops, out of love for their flock and righteous anger at the sin of fraud, should do the same.

We cannot undo globalisation. The internet has made the world smaller, and AI is making it spin faster. The Church needs to preach justice in the world we now have. The Dickensian under-economy did not last forever. It was answered by the social teaching of the Church and the slow reformation of a Christian civilisation. The global under-economy can be answered the same way, but it has to be named first.

The bishops should start naming it.