Southeast Asia remains the epicentre of scam centres running illegal online fraud schemes that target victims worldwide and generate billions of dollars in annual revenue. The UN estimates scam losses across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand reached between $88.3 billion and $114.1 billion in 2025.

Crime groups rapidly evolve tactics to stay ahead of law enforcement

Pressure from law enforcement across the region has prompted scam gangs to relocate from countries such as Myanmar and Laos to Timor-Leste, Pacific island states and parts of Africa. However, the shift has merely displaced the operations rather than dismantled them.

According to Delphine Schantz, UNODC Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, networks that once operated within specific territories or illicit trades are increasingly expanding across multiple illegal markets while using shared services. “Imagine specialised departments for laundering money, trafficking people, smuggling migrants, and harvesting data, all plugged into the same, service-based interconnected network,” she said.

Syndicates are engaging in "jurisdiction shopping" to find countries with weak governance and regulation, the report said, with corruption identified as the "primary enabler" of technology-driven organised crime in the region.

According to the UNODC, scam compounds across the region are staffed by trafficked foreign nationals held in oppressive conditions, with victims identified from at least 80 countries and territories. Recruitment networks use transit hubs across Asia, the Middle East and Africa and are increasingly recruiting from outside Asia, targeting people with German, Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French, Swedish, Norwegian and English language skills.

How scammers use AI

Beyond using generative AI to create content, criminal groups are expected to adopt agentic AI systems to more autonomously identify victims, conduct social engineering campaigns, and facilitate cryptocurrency theft and laundering, the report said.

The scam sector's rapid growth has fuelled an ecosystem of ancillary criminal services, including money laundering, underground banking and data trading, it said.

"The scale and complexity of this expanding organised crime economy are outpacing existing responses, which were not structured to address such sophisticated criminal activity,” said Inshik Sim, a lead analyst at UNODC.