"Billion-dollar cyberfraud industry expands in Southeast Asia as criminals adopt new technologies"
A new report launched today has found that Asian crime syndicates have integrated new service-based business models and technologies including malware, generative artificial intelligence (AI), and deepfakes into their operations while establishing new underground markets and cryptocurrency solutions for their money laundering needs.
The report, titled Transnational Organized Crime and the Convergence of Cyber-Enabled Fraud, Underground Banking, and Technological Innovation: A Shifting Threat Landscape, is the second in a series of ongoing threat analyses produced by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
“Organized crime groups are converging and exploiting vulnerabilities, and the evolving situation is rapidly outpacing governments’ capacity to contain it,” said Masood Karimipour, UNODC Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. “Leveraging technological advances, criminal groups are producing larger scale and harder to detect fraud, money laundering, underground banking and online scams. This has led to the creation of a criminal service economy, and the region has now emerged as a key testing ground for transnational criminal networks looking to expand their influence and diversify into new business lines.”
The report outlines recent cases that demonstrate how underregulated online gambling platforms and increasingly high-risk and often unauthorized virtual asset service providers (VASPs) that have proliferated in recent years are being used by major organized crime groups to move, launder and integrate billions in criminal proceeds into the financial system without accountability.
