Transnational Crime Steals Billions in Southeast Asia

Some of 771 suspects arrested in Golden Triangle cyber scam

In an article by Asia Sentinel, John Berthelsen discusses how a new 92-page report released in Bangkok by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reveals that transnational organized crime in Southeast Asia is evolving faster than at any previous point in history and expanding across the globe.

“We are seeing a global expansion of East and Southeast Asian organized crime groups,” said Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC Acting Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, in a prepared news release. “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.”

As these criminal networks have grown more sophisticated, they are increasingly taking on the guise of supposedly respectable industrial and science and technology parks as well as casinos and hotels, employing hundreds of thousands of multilingual trafficked victims and complicit individuals, according to the report, rapidly enabling Asian crime syndicates to broaden the scope of fraud victims being targeted globally and exacerbating existing challenges faced by law enforcement.

This transformation, according to the UNODC, under the relatively cumbersome title “Inflection Point: Global Implications of Scam Centres, Underground Banking and Illicit Online Marketplaces in Southeast Asia,” has been marked by proliferating “industrial scale cyber-enabled fraud and scam centers, driven by sophisticated transnational syndicates and interconnected networks of money launderers, human traffickers, data brokers, and a growing number of other specialist service providers and facilitators.”