U.N. report: Southeast Asian scam networks caused up to $114 billion in 2025 losses

A new United Nations threat assessment says transnational online scam networks operating from and through Southeast Asia drove an estimated $88.3 billion to $114.1 billion in victim losses in 2025 across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The estimate, published by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime on July 21 in Bangkok, underscores the scale of a scam economy that now stretches well beyond the Mekong subregion where many of the groups first drew global attention.

UNODC’s report, titled “An Interconnected Criminal Ecosystem: Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment for Southeast Asia 2026,” ties those losses to scam networks based in Southeast Asia and emphasizes that the figure is a range, not a single-point total. It is also not a loss estimate for Southeast Asia alone, and the report does not say how much of that money moved through cryptocurrency.

Instead, UNODC describes a broad, industrialized criminal system that blends online fraud with money laundering, trafficking and digital infrastructure. According to the agency, these networks rely on encrypted and private communications platforms, generative artificial intelligence, deepfakes, AI translation tools, malvertising, satellite communications, and cryptocurrency and other virtual-asset infrastructure to target victims and move funds. Delphine Schantz, UNODC’s regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said the model resembles “corporate franchising.” She added: “Imagine specialised departments for laundering money, trafficking people, smuggling migrants, and harvesting data, all plugged into the same, service-based interconnected network.”

The report says crackdowns on large scam compounds in parts of the Mekong border region — including Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia — have not shut the business down. Instead, UNODC says operators have adapted by dispersing into villas, moving into other countries, and breaking into smaller, harder-to-detect underground setups. That shift, the agency argues, has made the networks more fragmented but not less dangerous.

UNODC also links the scam-center economy to human trafficking and forced criminality, a pattern that has become a defining feature of the industry. Earlier reporting and previous U.N. work had already identified industrial-scale compounds in the Mekong subregion as major hubs, with trafficked workers often coerced into carrying out online fraud.

The new estimate is striking in part because it is far above earlier UNODC figures. Previous agency work focused on Southeast Asia in 2023 put losses in a much lower range of roughly $18 billion to $37 billion, suggesting a rapidly expanding and increasingly interconnected scam ecosystem.

For broader context, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, which tracks cyber and internet-enabled crime in the United States, said in its 2024 annual report that reported losses from internet-enabled crime reached about $16.6 billion in 2024. The bureau said investment fraud was the biggest category, with cryptocurrency-enabled investment scams accounting for more than $6.5 billion in losses.