BANGKOK : Asia Pacific scam gangs siphoned off at least $88 billion from victims in 2025, according to a United Nations agency, as transnational crime networks continue to refine their methods faster than authorities can respond.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said criminal syndicates in Southeast Asia, largely run by groups of Chinese origin, remain a global hub for cyberfraud. These networks are outrunning enforcement efforts by branching into new revenue streams, exploiting weak governance, and increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to power their operations.
Losses Rival the GDP of Entire Nations
According to the UNODC report, total scam-related losses across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand ranged between $88.3 billion and $114.1 billion in 2025, a sum that exceeds the entire GDP of several countries in the region.
Delphine Schantz, UNODC Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said criminal networks that once stayed confined to specific territories or illicit trades are now spreading across multiple illegal markets while sharing infrastructure and services. She compared their structure to corporate franchising, describing specialised divisions for money laundering, human trafficking, migrant smuggling and data harvesting, all connected through a shared, service-based network.
Scam operations across Southeast Asia run online fraud schemes targeting victims around the world, generating enormous annual profits. Many of these compounds rely on trafficked foreign workers held in abusive, confined conditions. UNODC has identified individuals from at least 80 countries and territories inside these scam compounds, with recruitment pipelines running through transit hubs across Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Recruitment Expands Beyond Asia, AI Use Grows
As scam networks push into new markets, operators are increasingly recruiting workers from outside Asia. UNODC noted that recruitment ads tied to the industry’s communication channels have specifically sought people fluent in German, Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French, Swedish, Norwegian and English.
Law enforcement pressure in the region has forced some operations to relocate rather than shut down entirely, with gangs moving out of Myanmar and Laos toward East Timor, Pacific Island nations and parts of Africa. UNODC described this pattern as “jurisdiction shopping,” where syndicates seek out locations with weak regulatory oversight. The report identified corruption as the primary driver enabling this kind of tech-fueled organised crime.
Beyond using generative AI tools to produce scam content, criminal groups are expected to increasingly deploy agentic AI systems capable of independently identifying targets, running social-engineering campaigns, and supporting cryptocurrency theft and laundering operations.
A Growing Criminal Ecosystem
The rapid expansion of the scam industry has also fueled a wider network of supporting criminal activity, including money laundering, underground banking and illicit data trading, the report found.
Inshik Sim, a lead analyst at UNODC, said the scale and sophistication of this expanding criminal economy have outpaced the tools currently available to combat it, since existing responses were never designed to handle organised crime of this complexity.
With Asia Pacific scam gangs continuing to adapt and expand into new territories and technologies, UNODC’s findings suggest that regional law enforcement faces an increasingly difficult challenge in containing an industry that keeps reinventing itself faster than it can be shut down.