Victims of transnational online scams in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand lost up to US$114.1 billion last year, a UN report said on Tuesday, with estimated losses at least tripling from 2023.

Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia and Myanmar, has emerged as a regional hub for crime syndicates running fake romance and cryptocurrency investment schemes in which scammers – some willing, others trafficked – defraud internet users around the world, often from fortified compounds.

But under pressure from several countries including China, the United States and Britain, authorities in the region say they are cracking down on the illicit industry.

Online scams, mostly from investment fraud, across the specified regions cost victims an estimated US$88.3 billion to US$114.1 billion last year, according to the new report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

The combined losses far exceed the US$18 billion to US$37 billion estimated to have been lost in 2023 and reflect "the dramatic scaling of this criminal economy", the report said.

The wider criminal ecosystem of Southeast Asia – which includes the illegal drug trade, online scams, human trafficking, illicit banking and real estate investment – has also transformed over the last decade, according to the UN agency.

Organised criminals are "moving away from a fragmented system of locally rooted criminal syndicates towards an increasingly integrated, transnational, and technologically sophisticated criminal economy", it said.

The shift has challenged conventional law enforcement and threatened regional governance, and economic and social stability, the UN body added.

"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," the UN body's regional representative, Delphine Schantz. said in a statement.

"Their operating model looks like corporate franchising: imagine specialised departments for laundering money, trafficking people, smuggling migrants, and harvesting data, all plugged into the same, service-based interconnected network." (AFP)




Edited by Azam Khan