https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2026/July/new-unodc-report...
South-East Asia’s criminal ecosystem has undergone a fundamental restructuring, according to a new report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Once-fragmented, locally rooted syndicates 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 Delphine Schantz, UNODC Regional Representative for South-East Asia and the Pacific, during the report launch today in Bangkok. “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.”
The report, titled An Interconnected Criminal Ecosystem: Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment for Southeast Asia 2026, reveals how criminals are weaving these different types of crime into a single, shared financial and operational infrastructure that is allowing for an increasingly thriving crime ecosystem.
From goods to services
Organized crime in the region is shifting from trafficking physical goods to selling services —cyber-enabled fraud, criminal infrastructure, and platform-based financial settlements— that leave little trace and are far harder to seize or attribute to any single actor.
UNODC’s new report puts a figure on that shift: combined annual losses from scam offences across East Asia, South-East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand are estimated at between USD 88.3 billion and USD 114.1 billion for 2025 alone, a sum that, even at the low end, outstrips the GDP of several countries in the region.
The shift has led to a surge of trafficking in persons for forced criminality across the globe. Individuals from at least 80 countries and territories have been identified in scam compounds in the region, with recruitment networks documented as operating through multiple transit hubs in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Communication channels linked to South-East Asia’s scam industry point to growing efforts to widen the recruitment pool toward Europe and North America, with advertisements targeting individuals with German, Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French, Swedish, Norwegian, and English language skills.
“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.”
The other triangle: Sulu-Celebes
Drug trafficking remains a significant threat across South-East Asia, with the Golden Triangle still the region’s main production hub. The combined annual retail value of the methamphetamine, ketamine, and heroin markets is estimated at between USD 75 billion and USD 109.7 billion, underscoring the resources available to organized crime groups to sustain and expand their operations. While links between this and other regions were traditionally perceived as marginal, evidence points to a strong expansion of synthetic drugs, heroin and cannabis from South-East Asia trafficked into other regions, including Africa, Europe and South Asia.
But beyond the Golden Triangle, the Sulu and Celebes Seas Triangle has emerged as an increasingly important smuggling corridor for transnational organized groups from within East and South-East Asia, and beyond. The maritime triangle connecting Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines is an area of growing strategic importance that has received comparatively limited analytical attention. The large volume of traffic through the region allows transnational organized crime groups to embed their illicit cargoes in legitimate trade flows to conceal their activity. This includes technology enablers of scam operations, such as low-earth orbit satellites, that can be moved undetected through the tri-border maritime region.
New victims: young gamers
Alongside well-documented chapters on scam operations and drug trafficking, the report breaks ground on emerging criminal markets — including illegal gambling, online child sexual exploitation, tobacco crime, and firearms trafficking. Of increasing concern is the way criminals are using the same structure of online casinos to gamify online gambling and make it appealing to younger targets. The dangerous mix of online gaming’s highly addictive nature and mobile accessibility puts young users at risk.
“The line between online gaming and online gambling is becoming more and more blurred,” Delphine Schantz said. “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.”
The report also dives deep into emerging technological trends, including generative AI, deep fakes and automated fraud that requires minimal human interaction. “Malvertising”, for example, the exploitation of legitimate advertising networks to deliver malware passively and at scale, has become a highly efficient channel for cybercrime, with incidents rising 42 per cent year-on-year in 2025.
“A counter-organized crime strategy focused on disruption alone does not work,” Delphine Schantz said. “We have to address all the drivers, including prevention and following the money. Seizing criminal proceeds hits these networks where it hurts, and makes potential victims more cautious. To follow the money, in the new crypto context, law enforcement in the region is in need of specialized training to identify, seize and recover these funds.”
