Victims of transnational online scams across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand lost an estimated $88.3 billion to $114.1 billion, or roughly ₹7.6 lakh crore to ₹9.8 lakh crore, in 2025, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in a report released this week. The figure exceeds the combined GDP of several countries in the region and marks what the agency called “the dramatic scaling” of an increasingly industrialised global scam economy.
A Threefold Surge in Two Years
The 2025 estimate is at least three times higher than the $18 billion to $37 billion UNODC had calculated for 2023, a jump the agency attributes not to better detection alone but to genuine expansion in scale and reach. Most of the losses stemmed from fraudulent investment schemes, cryptocurrency scams and romance scams, with China, South Korea and Taiwan recording the highest losses in the region over the past two years, each running into billions of dollars.
Delphine Schantz, UNODC’s regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, described the networks’ operating model as resembling corporate franchising, with specialised departments for laundering money, trafficking people, smuggling migrants and harvesting data all plugged into a shared, service-based network rather than operating as isolated criminal cells.
Cambodia and Myanmar at the Centre, but the Map Is Shifting
The report identifies Cambodia and Myanmar as the region’s primary operational hubs, where fortified scam compounds run large-scale romance and cryptocurrency fraud using staff who are, depending on the case, willing recruits or trafficking victims coerced into working under threat. Individuals from at least 80 countries and territories have been identified inside compounds across the Mekong region.
Crucially, UNODC warns that recent law enforcement pressure has displaced these operations rather than dismantled them. Networks are relocating from Myanmar and Laos toward Timor-Leste, Pacific Island states and parts of Africa, engaging in what the report calls “jurisdiction shopping” to find territories with weak governance, where corruption remains what UNODC describes as the “primary enabler” of tech-driven organised crime.
AI as Both Translator and Force Multiplier
One of the report’s central findings concerns artificial intelligence’s growing role in scaling these operations. AI-powered translation tools now let scammers communicate convincingly with victims across many languages, and recruitment advertisements for scam compound staff specifically seek fluency in German, Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French, Swedish, Norwegian and English, a marked shift from the industry’s early years, when operations focused almost exclusively on Chinese-speaking victims.
UNODC further cautioned that criminal groups are expected to move beyond generative AI toward agentic AI systems capable of autonomously identifying victims, running social-engineering campaigns, and facilitating cryptocurrency theft and laundering with minimal human oversight, a development that would further compress the cost and effort required to run large-scale fraud operations.
Enforcement Gains, But the Ecosystem Persists
International pressure has prompted visible enforcement action over the past year, including the extradition of several alleged scam network bosses from Cambodia to China, alongside sanctions from the United States and United Kingdom targeting companies and individuals accused of running scam enterprises fuelled by human trafficking. Yet UNODC stressed that dismantling individual compounds has done little to weaken the broader criminal ecosystem, since networks routinely relocate, restructure or franchise their operations to continue functioning with minimal disruption. The agency also flagged a troubling secondary effect: some individuals released from raided compounds later use the skills they acquired there to build or join similar fraud networks in their home countries.
Beyond investment and romance scams, the report describes a deeply interconnected criminal economy spanning drug trafficking, exploitation of trafficked individuals, migrant smuggling, money laundering and illicit real estate investment, increasingly bound together by cryptocurrency, encrypted communications and specialised service providers built to obscure financial trails across borders.
What It Means for India
A researcher at Algoritha Security noted that the findings show organised cybercrime evolving from isolated fraud operations into highly structured international enterprises leveraging AI, digital payments and transnational partnerships, and said governments, financial institutions and technology companies will need far stronger cross-border intelligence sharing and coordinated enforcement to meaningfully disrupt these networks. For India, which has stepped up its own mule-account crackdowns and cross-agency coordination frameworks through initiatives like the I4C’s Joint Cyber Coordination Teams, the UNODC findings offer a reminder that domestic enforcement gains can be quickly offset by fraud infrastructure that simply relocates elsewhere in the region, underscoring the case for deeper regional cooperation rather than country-by-country crackdowns alone.
