Delphine Schantz, the regional representative for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), says criminal groups once confined to a geographic area or criminal speciality are now moving through several illicit markets at once. “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.”
For victims of online scams in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, the cost reached an estimated $88.3 billion to $114.1 billion in 2025, largely through investment fraud, UNODC said. The upper estimate was $114.1 billion.
Those losses were triple the 2023 estimate of $18-37 billion.
Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia and Myanmar, has become a regional base for syndicates behind fake romance and cryptocurrency investment schemes. China, South Korea and Taiwan have reported the region’s biggest losses over the past two years, with each losing billions of dollars.
The groups initially concentrated on Chinese-speaking targets before extending their operations to victims around the world. Schantz said their structure now resembles corporate franchising, with specialist units for money laundering, human trafficking, migrant smuggling and data harvesting.
That model also ties fraud to wider exploitation. UNODC describes organised fraud as a hub crime that brings together and strengthens multiple forms of abuse, while criminal networks recruit vulnerable people, transfer money across borders and infiltrate legitimate digital and financial services. More than 80 nationalities have been identified among people trapped in scam-centre operations.
Large-scale operations commonly known as scam centres have been identified across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. They have also been found in Africa and Latin America.
Authorities have faced pressure from the United States, Britain and China to act against the industry. Washington and London have sanctioned firms and people accused of running extensive cyber scams fuelled by human trafficking, while several alleged network bosses were extradited from Cambodia to China in the last year.
The international response moved to Vienna in March 2026, when UNODC and Interpol co-organised the Global Fraud Summit. It brought together some 140 companies and drew over 140 endorsements for a call to action.
Monica Juma, executive director of UNODC and director general of the United Nations Office at Vienna, was involved in organising the summit and later events focused on organised fraud. The summit produced a global public-private partnership framework and set five priorities: national anti-fraud systems, stronger cross-border cooperation, meaningful partnerships between public bodies and companies, better use of technology and data to identify patterns, and protection for victims and survivors.
A follow-up event, “Tackling Organized Fraud: A Way Forward from the Global Fraud Summit”, took place on 21 September. It was organised by UNODC alongside the governments of Nigeria, Singapore, Thailand, the United Kingdom and Vietnam, with Interpol.
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