Southeast Asia’s Online Scam Industry is a Global Menace

A mushrooming industry of online scams issuing from Southeast Asia is prompting fresh warnings about ill-gotten gains that often grow to goodly sums before victims have time to discover they have been conned by attractive-sounding promises.

There are millions of these scams around the world, rooted in China, where counterfeiting is an industry and where the Chinese mafia has flourished in countries with corruption and weak governance, such as Cambodia and Myanmar, and abroad with the help of artificial intelligence.

Having previously targeted domestic victims, these operations are now using AI to populate rich online worlds, engage players in intricate scams and hide behind a veil of anonymity.

These include pretending to be law enforcement to scam bank details, pretending to be someone else online for romance or investment fraud, which is called “pig butchering”. The results are devastating as demonstrated by the 2024 collapse of United States based Heartland Tri-State Bank following the CEO becoming implicated in a cryptocurrency scam via these networks.

And the human cost is no less alarming. Hundreds of thousands of trafficked victims are kept here in these SCAM-centers and forced to perform work in miserable conditions with physical and emotional abuse and death threats.

Like the case of the O-Smach Resort in Cambodia, this has also exposed the complicity of some ASEAN member states and its even implicated top-level officials.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), such criminal networks are not only on the rise worldwide, but are more advanced than ever, in part because they are adopting such newly developed technologies as deepfakes, as well as “AI-generated child sexual exploitation material.”

They are also entering into partnership with international criminal groups to undertake money laundering as well as expand their illegal operations.

Southeast Asian countries must act decisively, including carrying out independent investigations into scam syndicates, strengthening laws, and bolstering international cooperation, experts said.

Dealing with the root causes including poverty and lack of opportunity which places people at risk of being trafficked is also vital. Without a collective response, this multi-billion-dollar sector will expand further, posing risks to national and international security and trade.