Southeast Asia: UNODC report shows global expansion of cyber scams by syndicates with use of underground banking & technological innovation to adapt to crackdowns
"Cyberfraud in the Mekong reaches inflection point, UNODC reveals", 21 April 2025
Transnational organized crime groups in East and Southeast Asia are hedging beyond the region as crack-down pressure increases, a new report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) shows. Amidst heightened awareness and enforcement action, Asian crime syndicates are expanding operations deeper into many of the most remote, vulnerable, underprepared parts of the region — and beyond…
The infamous scam compounds dotted around special economic zones, or SEZs, and other border areas across the region, and especially in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and the Philippines, are now being displaced as a response to mounting law enforcement pressure, leading to a spillover into other parts of the region. While crackdowns disrupt existing operations, these continuously reappear in other purpose-built business parks developed to house and service more online crime operations. The venues and businesses feature all of the conditions, infrastructure, and regulatory, legal, and fiscal covers required for sustained growth and expansion.
… The dispersal of these sophisticated criminal networks within areas of weakest governance has attracted new players, benefited from and fueled corruption, and enabled the illicit industry to continue to scale and consolidate, culminating in hundreds of industrial-scale scam centres generating just under US $40 billion in annual profits, according to latest UNODC estimates…
Many of these groups have managed to take on industrial proportions by reinvesting their profits and leveraging vast multi-lingual workforces comprised of hundreds of thousands of trafficked victims and complicit individuals …
This expansion has been fueled by new illicit online markets and crime-as-a-service. Criminal groups have evolved into more advanced cyber threat actors supported by adjacent money laundering networks, data brokers, and a range of malware, deepfake and other AI-driven technology services that allow them to adapt to crackdowns.