According to a report released by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on April,2025, transnational organized crime groups in East and Southeast Asia are expanding their operations outside of the area as the pressure to crack down on them intensifies.
Asian crime syndicates are extending their activities further into many of the most isolated, vulnerable, and unprepared areas of the region — and beyond — in the face of increased awareness and enforcement action.
The study, Inflection Point: Global Implications of Scam Centres, Underground Banking, and Illicit Online Marketplaces in Southeast Asia, is one of several policy briefs and regional threat studies that UNODC has released.
A response to increasing law enforcement pressure is now displacing the infamous scam compounds that are scattered throughout special economic zones, or SEZs, and other border areas throughout the region, particularly in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and the Philippines. This is causing a ripple effect in other regions.
Although current operations are disrupted by crackdowns, these keep resurfacing in new business parks that were specifically designed to accommodate and support more online crime operations. All the infrastructure, circumstances, and legal, regulatory, and financial protections needed for long-term growth and expansion are present in the enterprises and venues.
The latest UNODC estimates indicate that hundreds of industrial-scale scam centres generate just under US $40 billion in annual profits, thanks to the dispersion of these sophisticated criminal networks within areas of weakest governance, which has drawn new players, benefited from and fueled corruption, and allowed the illicit industry to continue to scale and consolidate.
The ability of criminal groups to launder money through underground banking and cryptocurrencies, accumulating enormous sums of illicit revenues that infiltrate banking systems around the world, is what drives their ongoing success. Global consequences result from the rise of criminal players from the region and beyond as leaders in money laundering, underground banking, and cyber-enabled fraud in international markets.
The study reveals that the involvement of criminal groups from other parts of the world is also increasing. It shows that cyber fraud activities are expanding and accelerating, and that new synergies are forming between criminal groups and an increasing number of recently arrived adjacent service providers and innovators.
