The Asian crime syndicates behind an explosion in online scamming operations in Southeast Asia are expanding both within and beyond the region in response to intensifying crackdowns by the region’s governments, according to the United Nations.
In a report published yesterday, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warned that cyberscammers “have sought to hedge their risk and ensure business continuity by expanding new and existing operations deeper into many of the most remote, vulnerable, and underprepared parts of Southeast Asia, and increasingly other regions.” According to the UNODC report, these regions include South America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and some Pacific island nations.
“We are seeing a global expansion of East and Southeast Asian organized crime groups,” Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC Acting Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said in a statement accompanying the report’s release. “This reflects both a natural expansion as the industry grows and seeks new ways and places to do business, but also a hedging against future risks should disruption continue and intensify in Southeast Asia.”
As UNODC and other organizations have documented, Southeast Asia is currently beset by a region-wide wave of digital criminality, perpetrated mostly by Chinese criminal syndicates, which runs the gamut from romance-investment scams and crypto fraud to money laundering and illegal gambling. These operations, which have been established in loosely regulated parts of Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, and Myanmar, have relied on a large indentured workforce – mostly ordinary people who have been attracted by promises of employment, only to be kept imprisoned and forced to operate various types of digital scams, often on pain of beatings, mistreatment, and torture.
In 2023, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights cited “credible sources” to the effect that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar and at least 100,000 in Cambodia “may be held in situations where they are forced to carry out online scams.” This ghastly machinery generated close to $37 billion from cyberscams in 2023, the UNODC report stated, while the United States reported more than $5.6 billion in losses.
The report suggests that the increased awareness of online scamming syndicates and the increased law enforcement operations by the region’s governments directed toward it have done little to disrupt these operations fundamentally.
Since the beginning of 2025, under strong pressure from the Chinese government, which was forced to act after the abduction of a well-known Chinese actor in January, Thailand has led a multi-national crackdown on the scamming centers that have sprung up along its borders with Myanmar. It has cut supplies of power, internet, and fuel to border areas known to harbor scam operations, requested arrest warrants for members of Myanmar-based militias, and initiated probes into local Thai police officials suspected of collusion with criminal syndicates.
But the sophistication of the scamming syndicates, which, according to UNODC, are supported by “interconnected networks of money launderers, human traffickers, data brokers, and a growing number of other specialist service providers and facilitators,” has allowed them to adapt to these threats. The report noted that operations have shifted into “more remote locations” in the lower Mekong region, as well as into other nations with similarly accommodating jurisdictions.
“It spreads like a cancer,” Hofmann said. “Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear; they simply migrate.”
The report documented the presence of scamming operations with links to Asian crime syndicates in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and “select Pacific islands,” especially in nations where “awareness and understanding of emerging threats, crime types, modus operandi, and technologies leveraged by Asian criminal groups is low.”
The “subtle and ongoing spillover” into other regions has allowed Asian crime syndicates to “broaden the scope of their operations and target an increasingly diverse range of victim profiles and nationalities from around the world,” the report stated. This, in turn, has further complicated attempts by any one government to successfully eliminate the scourge from its own country. (One challenge that the UNODC avoids mentioning, due to its reliance on cooperation with U.N. member states, is the collusion of local elites in the explosion of scamming activities, which have been amply documented in the case of Cambodia.)
By way of conclusion, UNODC urged the world to act to meet the challenges posed by these cybercrime operations, saying that the situation was at a “critical inflection point” and that failing to do so would have “unprecedented and potentially irreversible consequences for Southeast Asia that will be felt globally for years to come.”
Given that the region’s governments have failed so far to mount a law enforcement response commensurate with the challenge of the cyber-fraud syndicates, it is hard to be optimistic about anything approaching success in the short to medium term.