Bangkok (Thailand), 21 April 2025 –
Transnational organized crime groups in East and Southeast
Asia are hedging beyond the region as pressure to crack them
down 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.
“We are seeing a global expansion of
East and Southeast Asian organized crime groups,” said
Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC Acting Regional Representative for
Southeast Asia and the Pacific. “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.”
The report, titled Inflection Point:
Global Implications of Scam Centres, Underground Banking and
Illicit Online Marketplaces in Southeast Asia, is part
of a series of regional threat analyses and policy briefs
produced by UNODC.
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.
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“It
spreads like a cancer,” Hofmann said. “Authorities treat it
in one area, but the roots never disappear; they simply
migrate. This has resulted in a situation in which the
region has essentially become an interconnected ecosystem,
driven by sophisticated syndicates freely exploiting
vulnerabilities, jeopardizing state sovereignty, and
distorting and corrupting policy-making processes and other
government systems and institutions.”
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.
Criminal groups’
continued success is fueled by their capacity to launder
money through cryptocurrencies and underground banking,
amassing massive amounts of criminal proceeds that
infiltrate banking systems globally. As illicit actors from
the region and beyond become leaders in cyber-enabled fraud,
money laundering and underground banking in global markets,
the repercussions are felt worldwide.
Global
footprint
The trend to hedge beyond the region has
been consistent with continued reports of crackdowns
targeting Asian-led scam centres that have been found
operating in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and select
Pacific islands, as well as related money laundering,
trafficking in persons, and recruitment services discovered
to go as far as Europe, North America, and South
America.
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 — the results of which could be seen during
the first few months of the year in Myanmar’s Myawaddy,
where thousands of people were stranded after being released
from scam centers operating in the border
areas.
Involvement of criminal groups from other parts
of the world is also growing, the new study shows, revealing
not only an expansion and acceleration of cyberfraud
operations, but also new interlinkages between illicit
actors, service providers and innovators within and beyond
the region.
Cyber-enabled fraud, underground banking
and technological innovation
Shifting threats
associated with this expansion is the way criminal groups
are evolving into wider cyberthreat actors. New online
markets, money laundering networks, stolen data products,
malware, AI, and deepfake technologies, among others, are
laying the ground for the rise of crime-as-a-service. The
phenomenon is fueled by new illicit online marketplaces
where actors can freely convene and conduct their businesses
online, adopting sophisticated technological innovations
that allow them to adapt to crackdowns.
“The
convergence between the acceleration and professionalization
of these operations on the one hand and their geographical
expansion into new parts of the region and beyond on the
other translates into a new intensity in the industry —
one that governments need to be prepared to respond to,”
Hofmann said.
What next?
The
report includes recommendations for governments in Southeast
Asia and beyond to shape response strategies. These go from
intensifying financial disruption measures, enhancing
coordination on financial intelligence, all the way to
scaling financial investigations and asset recovery through
regional and international
collaboration.
This latest report is part
of a growing body of threat analyses conducted by UNODC on
transnational organized crime in Southeast Asia. Findings of
these reports have been presented to policymakers, law
enforcement agencies, international partners, academics, and
other experts, with the objective of fostering dialogue and
advancing efforts to address organized crime more
effectively.
