The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) published a report Tuesday that found transnational gangs looted at least $88 billion from Southeast Asia in 2025, using a wide variety of telephone and cyber scams, often employing slave labor at notorious “scam centers” that resemble prison camps.
The report, titled An Interconnected Criminal Ecosystem: Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment for Southeast Asia 2026, warned that numerous smaller gangs have “merged into a single transnational, tech-driven criminal economy sophisticated enough to outpace conventional law enforcement and threaten governance, economic stability, and development in the region and beyond.”
“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,” said the UNODC’s Delphine Schantz.
“Their operating model looks like corporate franchising: imagine specialized departments for laundering money, trafficking people, smuggling migrants, and harvesting data, all plugged into the same, service-based interconnected network,” Schantz said.
The result is a fast-growing criminal conglomerate that seems capable of exploring every nook and cranny of cyberspace in the pursuit of plunder, as well as running drug and human smuggling operations back in the real world.
Business is so good that the gangs are recruiting new operatives from at least 80 different countries – and much of that “recruitment” involves kidnapping and human trafficking. Regional law enforcement has for years been grappling with “scam centers” that lure victims with promises of legitimate computer work, only to capture and enslave them.
The scam centers have been such huge profit centers, and their cybercrimes are so difficult to prosecute, that UNODC said gangs are “shifting from trafficking physical goods to selling services.”
The hottest physical goods in the new criminal economy are the people who end up chained to desks and running crypto scams, and a vast network of more legitimate businesses is flourishing to service these massive criminal enterprises.
“The growth we are seeing has fueled an entire ecosystem of ancillary services, many of them operating under the appearance of legitimate commercial activity,” said UNODC lead analyst Inshik Sim.
“The scale and complexity of this expanding organized crime economy are outpacing existing responses, which were not structured to address such sophisticated criminal activity,” Sim added.
A fast-growing element of the underworld economy is online gambling, which rakes in so much money that it is metastasizing like cancer and infesting online leisure gaming. Gangs are using sophisticated methods, including artificial intelligence, to lure young gamers into addictive gambling networks.
The report literally describes “the mass-market exposures of youth populations to illegal online gambling through social media, influencer networks, and gamified mobile interfaces” as a “public health crisis.”
“The true scale of harm remains substantially undercounted, as gambling disorder remains significantly under-researched in Southeast Asia,” the report noted.
“The line between online gaming and online gambling is becoming more and more blurred. While online gaming initially refers to interactive digital play without mandatory monetary stakes, the two sectors have converged through design features that deliberately exploit this ambiguity, making the crime more dangerous,” Schantz warned.
The diversified portfolio of Southeast Asia’s gangs includes a great deal of “crime as a service,” with big gangs offering services, information, and malware to smaller operations for a fee.
One of the most alarming passages of the UNODC report concerns “intelligence as a service,” in which criminal gangs monetize their access to corrupt police, immigration officials, and corporate employees.
It has become a simple matter for criminals across the region to learn if they are wanted by the police in any particular country, locate safe border crossings, and escape before their operations are raided. “Data brokers” are selling everything from government surveillance data to flight manifests on the black market. The most ambitious gangs actually take out advertisements to recruit “friends in government” who will supply them with data to sell.
The gangs have mastered drone warfare as well, using drones for everything from surveillance to carrying parcels of drugs across miles of rough terrain. Police in Malaysia and the Philippines say they are seizing drones that have been modified to drop contraband packages into the hands of buyers, the same way military drones drop bombs. Southeast Asian militant groups have developed profitable sidelines in selling their drone expertise to gangsters and protecting scam centers from police raids.
According to UNODC, the game changer for Southeast Asian organized crime was the arrival of Chinese gang lords, who brought previously unseen levels of organization and technological expertise to criminal gangs. China also created “special economic zones” on the borders of countries like Myanmar and Cambodia, which have become booming safe havens for cybercrime centers.
“Traditional Chinese-speaking secret society networks, including elements with Triad connections, have adapted longstanding roles in gambling, drug trafficking, and money laundering to the digital criminal economy, leveraging established relationships with power brokers, with political elites and their proxies, corrupt officials, and armed group commanders to facilitate the expansion of scam operations into new jurisdictions,” the report said.
UNODC’s policy recommendations included a greater focus on the victims of cybercrime, advising governments to strengthen their efforts at identifying and protecting the victims, especially those who are rescued from involuntary servitude.
“Particular attention should be given to children and young people, who feature as a disproportionate share of victims across multiple criminal markets documented in this report, and whose exposure to online exploitation, trafficking, and online gambling requires dedicated and adequately funded protective frameworks,” the report said.
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