South-East Asia’s criminal ecosystem has undergone a
fundamental restructuring, according to a
new report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Once-fragmented, locally rooted syndicates have merged into
a single transnational, tech-driven criminal economy
sophisticated enough to outpace conventional law enforcement
and threaten governance, economic stability, and development
in the region and beyond.
“What we are seeing is a
shift in which groups that stayed within their own
geographic domain and criminal specialty are now operating
across multiple illicit markets at once, relying on the same
service streams,” said Delphine Schantz, UNODC Regional
Representative for South-East Asia and the Pacific, during
the report launch today in Bangkok. “Their operating model
looks like corporate franchising: imagine specialized
departments for laundering money, trafficking people,
smuggling migrants, and harvesting data, all plugged into
the same, service-based interconnected network.”
The
report, titled An Interconnected Criminal
Ecosystem: Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment
for Southeast Asia 2026, reveals how criminals are
weaving these different types of crime into a single, shared
financial and operational infrastructure that is allowing
for an increasingly thriving crime ecosystem.
From
goods to services
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Organized crime in the region is
shifting from trafficking physical goods to selling services
—cyber-enabled fraud, criminal infrastructure, and
platform-based financial settlements— that leave little
trace and are far harder to seize or attribute to any single
actor.
UNODC’s new report puts a figure on that
shift: combined annual losses from scam offences across East
Asia, South-East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand are
estimated at between USD 88.3 billion and USD 114.1 billion
for 2025 alone, a sum that, even at the low end, outstrips
the GDP of several countries in the region.
The shift
has led to a surge of trafficking in persons for forced
criminality across the globe. Individuals from at least 80
countries and territories have been identified in scam
compounds in the region, with recruitment networks
documented as operating through multiple transit hubs in
Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Communication channels
linked to South-East Asia’s scam industry point to growing
efforts to widen the recruitment pool toward Europe and
North America, with advertisements targeting individuals
with German, Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French,
Swedish, Norwegian, and English language
skills.
“The growth we are seeing has fueled an
entire ecosystem of ancillary services, many of them
operating under the appearance of legitimate commercial
activity,” said UNODC lead analyst Inshik Sim. “The
scale and complexity of this expanding organized crime
economy are outpacing existing responses, which were not
structured to address such sophisticated criminal
activity.”
The other triangle:
Sulu-Celebes
Drug trafficking remains a significant
threat across South-East Asia, with the Golden Triangle
still the region’s main production hub. The combined
annual retail value of the methamphetamine, ketamine, and
heroin markets is estimated at between USD 75 billion and
USD 109.7 billion, underscoring the resources available to
organized crime groups to sustain and expand their
operations. While links between this and other regions were
traditionally perceived as marginal, evidence points to a
strong expansion of synthetic drugs, heroin and cannabis
from South-East Asia trafficked into other regions,
including Africa, Europe and South Asia.
But beyond
the Golden Triangle, the Sulu and Celebes Seas Triangle has
emerged as an increasingly important smuggling corridor for
transnational organized groups from within East and
South-East Asia, and beyond. The maritime triangle
connecting Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines is an
area of growing strategic importance that has received
comparatively limited analytical attention. The large volume
of traffic through the region allows transnational organized
crime groups to embed their illicit cargoes in legitimate
trade flows to conceal their activity. This includes
technology enablers of scam operations, such as low-earth
orbit satellites, that can be moved undetected through the
tri-border maritime region.
New victims: young
gamers
Alongside well-documented chapters on scam
operations and drug trafficking, the report breaks ground on
emerging criminal markets — including illegal gambling,
online child sexual exploitation, tobacco crime, and
firearms trafficking. Of increasing concern is the way
criminals are using the same structure of online casinos to
gamify online gambling and make it appealing to younger
targets. The dangerous mix of online gaming’s highly
addictive nature and mobile accessibility puts young users
at risk.
“The line between online gaming and online
gambling is becoming more and more blurred,” Delphine
Schantz said. “While online gaming initially refers to
interactive digital play without mandatory monetary stakes,
the two sectors have converged through design features that
deliberately exploit this ambiguity, making the crime more
dangerous.”
The report also dives deep into emerging
technological trends, including generative AI, deep fakes
and automated fraud that requires minimal human interaction.
“Malvertising”, for example, the exploitation of
legitimate advertising networks to deliver malware passively
and at scale, has become a highly efficient channel for
cybercrime, with incidents rising 42 per cent year-on-year
in 2025.
“A counter-organized crime strategy focused
on disruption alone does not work,” Delphine Schantz said.
“We have to address all the drivers, including prevention
and following the money. Seizing criminal proceeds hits
these networks where it hurts, and makes potential victims
more cautious. To follow the money, in the new crypto
context, law enforcement in the region is in need of
specialized training to identify, seize and recover these
funds.”
