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Scam gangs stole up to $114 billion from people in Asia-Pacific alone in 2025, the UN has warned, as crime syndicates rapidly professionalise their tactics to evade law enforcement in Southeast Asia.
By way of comparison, the sum dwarfs the $85 billion the UK spends each year on defence.
The Asia-Pacific region has emerged as an epicentre for massive cyber fraud operations since the Covid pandemic. Scammers – some willingly, others under duress – are now stealing billions from internet users across the world via fake romance and cryptocurrency investment schemes.
In 2025, these fraud operations stole between $88.3 and $114.1bn from just people across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, according to a report on Tuesday from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Those figures are triple the estimated losses in 2023, between $18 and $37bn, and don’t account for victims in Europe or the US.
The scam centres – which began in fortified compounds but are now increasingly housed in innocuous office blocks and villas – are found across the region, but have especially exploited power vacuums caused by war, corruption and weak governance in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos.
Although the scammers initially targeted people in China, they have dramatically expanded their ambitions. The UNODC said people from at least 80 countries and territories had been identified in compounds, with recruiters seeking people from outside Asia as they look to expand new markets.
While many people are unwillingly trafficked into scam centres, others go more willingly. Recent recruitment adverts have said asked for for people with German, Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French, Swedish, Norwegian and English language skills.
The UNODC warned that the growth of online scams has also catalysed a broader transformation in the criminal ecosystem across Southeast Asia. This includes drug trafficking, the illicit wildlife trade, human trafficking, child exploitation and money laundering.
“The transnational crime syndicate landscape has really undergone a very profound transformation… and has reached a scale and complexity that we have never seen before,” Delphine Schantz, the UNODC regional representative, told a press briefing.
She added that gangs are moving away from a fragmented system of locally rooted syndicates and merging into a single, industrial-scale service economy with shared financial infrastructure.
This operating model “looks like corporate franchising”, Ms Schantz said, with specialised departments for underground banking, harvesting data and trafficking people – all connected through the same service-based network.
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Troy Lulashnyk, the director general of Peace and Security Programs at Global Affairs Canada, described this as a “paradigm shift” driven by new technologies, especially AI.
“It is a dramatically, fundamentally changed environment – what we’ve seen certainly is the explosion of digitally enabled crime,” he told journalists. “[Scam centres] have metastasised.”
The scale of the crime ecosystem also makes it significantly more difficult to tackle, the UN warned – and the tactics, which are outpacing law enforcement, are spreading elsewhere.
Although Southeast Asian countries have launched crackdowns on the illicit industry, especially after pressure from countries including the UK, US and China, this has displaced rather than dismantled operations. For instance scam centres have also been spotted in East Timor, Pacific Island states, and parts of Africa.
Ms Schantz said: “There is this convergence and partnership that is being developed with Southeast Asia, being a criminal hub, servicing other regions in the world. So the new criminal market that we see here now flourishing will be affecting other regions.
“A purely law enforcement response will certainly not be enough, and it’s very essential that we also focus on prevention,” she added.
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