Because the way they write numbers is generally misunderstood in the west. Wan, the ten thousand character, and Yi, the hundred million character, are typically the crux of translating big numbers like this.

万 (wàn) comes up the most often and is the largest stumbling block for most people learning Mandarin numbers. In English, numbers are usually broken up into chunks of three digits. Because of 万 (wàn), it's easier to break numbers up into groups of four in Mandarin. In English, we split "twelve thousand" numerically into "12,000" (chunks of three digits). Split it the Chinese way, "1,2000," and the Chinese reading "一万两千" (one wan and two "thousand" = yīwàn liǎngqiān) makes more sense.

Not saying the figure isn't exaggerated, but holy shit it's obvious why it's translated this way in articles if you look even slightly beyond the surface.