Scam losses in Asian regions up to $114 bn in 2025: UN

Victims of transnational online scams across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand lost an estimated $88.3 billion to $114.1 billion last year, with losses at least tripling from 2023, according to a UN report released on Tuesday.

Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia and Myanmar, has emerged as a regional hub for criminal syndicates operating fake romance and cryptocurrency investment scams. The operations often rely on scammers, some acting willingly and others trafficked, to defraud internet users around the world from heavily fortified compounds.

However, under pressure from countries including the United States, Britain and China, authorities across the region say they have intensified efforts to dismantle the illicit industry.

Several alleged scam network leaders were extradited from Cambodia to China over the past year after Washington and London imposed sanctions on companies and individuals accused of operating extensive cyber scam networks fuelled by human trafficking.

According to the latest report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), online scams, primarily involving investment fraud, cost victims across the region between $88.3 billion and $114.1 billion last year.

The estimated losses far exceeded the $18 billion to $37 billion recorded in 2023, reflecting "the dramatic scaling of this criminal economy", the report said.

China, South Korea and Taiwan recorded the highest financial losses from online scams in the region over the past two years, with each losing billions of dollars, it added.

The cyber scam industry has expanded rapidly across Southeast Asia in recent years. Organised criminal groups initially targeted Chinese-speaking victims before broadening their operations to scam people worldwide.

The UNODC said the region's wider criminal ecosystem, encompassing the illegal drug trade, online scams, human trafficking, illicit banking and property investment, has undergone a significant transformation over the past decade.

Organised crime groups are "moving away from a fragmented system of locally rooted criminal syndicates toward an increasingly integrated, transnational, and technologically sophisticated criminal economy", the report said.

The shift has challenged traditional law enforcement approaches while posing growing risks to regional governance, economic stability and social security.

"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," UNODC 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."