Chinese and Southeast Asian gangs are raking in tens of billions of dollars a year targeting victims through investment, cryptocurrency, romance and other scams -- using an army of workers often trafficked and forced to toil in squalid compounds.
The activity has largely been focused in Myanmar's lawless border areas and dubious "special economic zones" set up in Cambodia and Laos.
But a new report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warned the networks are building up operations in South America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and some Pacific islands.
"We are seeing a global expansion of East and Southeast Asian organised crime groups," said Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC Acting Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
"This reflects both a natural expansion as the industry grows and seeks new ways and places to do business, but also a hedging against future risks should disruption continue and intensify in Southeast Asia."
Countries in east and southeast Asia lost an estimated $37 billion to cyber fraud in 2023, the UNODC report said, adding that "much larger estimated losses" were reported around the world.
The syndicates have expanded in Africa -- notably in Zambia, Angola and Namibia -- as well as Pacific islands such as Fiji, Palau, Tonga and Vanuatu.
Besides seeking new bases and new victims, the criminal gangs are broadening their horizons to help launder their illicit income, the report said, pointing to team-ups with "South American drug cartels, the Italian mafia, and Irish mob, among many others".
Illicit cryptocurrency mining -- unregulated and anonymous -- has become a "powerful tool" for the networks to launder money, the report said.
In June 2023 a sophisticated crypto mining operation in a militia-controlled territory in Libya, equipped with high-powered computers and high-voltage cooling units, was raided and 50 Chinese nationals arrested.
The global spread of the syndicates' operations has been driven in part by pressure from authorities in Southeast Asia.
A major crackdown on scam centres in Myanmar this year, pushed by Beijing, led to around 7,000 workers from at least two dozen counrties being freed.But the UN report warns that while such efforts disrupt the scam gangs' immediate activities, they have shown themselves able to adapt and relocate swiftly.
"It spreads like a cancer," UNODC's Hoffman said."Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear, they simply migrate."
Alongside the scam centres, staffed by a workforce estimated by the UN to be in the hundreds of thousands, the industry is further enabled by new technological developments.
Operators have developed their own online ecosystems with payment applications, encrypted messaging platforms and cryptocurrencies, to get round mainstream platforms that might be targeted by law enforcement.
Transnational organized crime groups in East and Southeast Asia are spreading their lucrative scam operations across the globe in response to increased crackdowns by authorities, according to a U.N. report issued on Monday.
For several years, scam compounds have proliferated in Southeast Asia, especially in border areas of Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, as well as in the Philippines, shifting operations from site to site to stay a step ahead of the police.
More recently, scam centers that have bilked victims out of billions of dollars through false romantic ploys, bogus investment pitches and illegal gambling schemes are now being reported operating as far afield as Africa and Latin America.
Asian crime syndicates have been expanding operations deeper into remote areas with lax law enforcement that are vulnerable to the influx, according to the report issued by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime or UNODC. The report is titled “Inflection Point: Global Implications of Scam Centers, Underground Banking and Illicit Online Marketplaces in Southeast Asia.”
“This reflects both a natural expansion as the industry grows and seeks new ways and places to do business, but also a hedging against future risks should disruption continue and intensify in Southeast Asia,” Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC's acting regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said in a statement.
UNODC estimates that hundreds of industrial-scale scam centers generate just under $40 billion in annual profits.
The trend to hedge beyond the region has been consistent with continued reports of crackdowns targeting Asian-led scam centers that have been found operating in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and select Pacific islands, as well as related money laundering, people trafficking and recruitment services discovered in Europe, North America and South America.
In Africa, Nigeria has become a hot spot, with police raids in late 2024 and early 2025 leading to many arrests, including people from East and Southeast Asia suspected of cryptocurrency and romance scams. Zambia and Angola have also busted Asian-linked cyberfraud operations.
In Latin America, the report says that it's “notable that Brazil has emerged as one country that has faced a growing set of challenges related to cyber-enabled fraud, online gambling, and related money laundering, with some linkages to criminal groups operating in Southeast Asia.”
It also notes that in late 2023 in Peru, more than 40 Malaysians were rescued after being trafficked by a Taiwan-based gang known as the Red Dragon syndicate that forced them to commit cyber-enabled fraud.
The report also points to crackdowns on Asian-led scam centers in the Middle East and some Pacific islands.
Alarmingly, even as Asian-led groups have been expanding the geographical scope of their operations, the involvement of criminal groups from other parts of the world is also growing, the report says.
New online markets, money laundering networks, stolen data products, malware, artificial intelligence and deepfake technologies are laying the ground for the rise of crime as a service, the report says. These technological innovations facilitate conducting their businesses online and adapt to crackdowns.
“The convergence between the acceleration and professionalization of these operations on the one hand and their geographical expansion into new parts of the region and beyond on the other translates into a new intensity in the industry — one that governments need to be prepared to respond to,” Hofmann says.
