Can Southeast Asia address the increasing menace of cyber scams?

[WORLD] Southeast Asia’s digital economy is on a meteoric rise, projected to hit $600 billion in gross merchandise value by 2030. Yet beneath this optimism, a darker reality threatens to derail the region’s progress: the unchecked proliferation of billion-dollar cyber scam centers. These operations—run by sophisticated transnational criminal networks—are not only siphoning off tens of billions of dollars annually but are also eroding public trust, destabilizing financial systems, and undermining national sovereignty. As US authorities impose sanctions on enablers in Cambodia, Myanmar, and the Philippines, and as the United Nations warns of a “potentially irreversible spillover,” leaders and investors must confront a hard truth: the region’s digital promise is at risk of being hollowed out from within. The strategic risk is no longer hypothetical. It is existential.

Context: The Scale and Sophistication of Southeast Asia’s Scam Economy

What began as a fringe criminal activity has now morphed into one of Southeast Asia’s most lucrative shadow economies. The cyber scam industry, once dismissed as small-scale deception, now operates with the scale and sophistication of a multinational enterprise. According to UNODC, scam networks in the Mekong region rack up between $7.5 billion and $12.5 billion in annual losses—staggering figures that barely scratch the surface when compared to Cambodia’s estimated $40 billion scam economy. Driving this growth are transnational crime syndicates, largely Chinese in origin, that thrive in a region where regulation is patchy, borders are fluid, and corruption often greases the wheels. The pandemic only deepened their reach. With physical casinos sidelined, operators rapidly shifted online—turning to lightly policed digital wallets, mass server infrastructure, and grey-market payment gateways to scale up fraud and move dirty money with alarming efficiency.

The human cost is staggering. Reports suggest that over 100,000 people have been trafficked into scam compounds in Cambodia, with similar numbers in Myanmar, where criminal groups forcibly detain workers and subject them to violence and coercion. “As the online crime industries have expanded, the workforce has grown rapidly, drawing in people from across the world, many trafficked and forced to work under conditions of extreme cruelty,” the UNODC noted in its 2025 report. Scam typologies now span a disturbingly wide spectrum—from crypto pump-and-dump schemes and long-con romance frauds (“pig-butchering”) to the fast-emerging threat of deepfake extortion powered by AI. The latter isn’t just a fringe concern anymore: references to such tactics in criminal chatter spiked by over 600% in the first half of 2024, signaling a shift from novelty to mainstream weapon.

Enforcement hasn’t been absent, but its effectiveness remains in question. The US Treasury’s sanctions against Myanmar’s Karen National Army, accused of enabling scam operations, and joint crackdowns across Cambodia and Laos, made headlines. Yet few analysts are celebrating. These are tactical gains in a war of attrition. The networks behind the fraud are nimble, transnational, and quick to adapt—vanishing from one jurisdiction only to reappear in another, often with new digital masks and updated scripts. The challenge isn’t just chasing them down—it’s keeping up with how fast the game changes.
As Benedikt Hofmann of the UNODC put it, “It spreads like a cancer. Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear; they simply migrate”.

Strategic Comparison: Why Traditional Regulatory Playbooks Are Failing

What distinguishes Southeast Asia’s cyber scam crisis from past waves of organized crime is its systemic integration with the region’s digital transformation. Unlike the drug cartels or piracy rings of previous decades, today’s scam syndicates are embedded within the very infrastructure of digital commerce and finance. They exploit regulatory arbitrage—moving operations across borders, leveraging the digital economy’s weakest links, and operating with impunity in “gray special economic zones” where state oversight is minimal.

This is not merely a Southeast Asian problem. The UNODC warns of a “global expansion,” with scam syndicates now targeting Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Europe as enforcement tightens in the Mekong region. The business model is ruthlessly efficient: criminal groups hedge risk by diversifying geographically, adopting new technologies, and outsourcing specialist services such as money laundering and data brokering. The result is a criminal supply chain that rivals legitimate tech startups in agility and innovation.

Regulatory responses, while intensifying, remain fragmented. ASEAN’s consensus-based decision-making and non-interference principles have hamstrung coordinated action, leaving member states to pursue piecemeal interventions—such as Singapore’s anti-scam hotline or Malaysia’s National Scam Response Centre. Even multilateral efforts, like the ASEAN Regional Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), are nascent and under-resourced relative to the scale of the threat. As one UN official observed, “In the past, countries in the region did not see [scam centers] as a shared priority. This is changing,” but not fast enough to outpace the criminals.

Implication: The Strategic Risks for Investors, Policymakers, and Founders

For investors, the implications are profound. The unchecked rise of scam centers is eroding digital trust—an essential foundation for Southeast Asia’s economic growth story. Consumer confidence is faltering: more than half of online users in the region now cite fraud as their top concern, with direct experiences of financial crime reported by over 30% of respondents in Singapore and Malaysia. In Malaysia alone, scams cost the nation $12.8 billion in 2024—equivalent to 3% of GDP. This is not just a compliance headache; it is a macroeconomic risk.

Founders and digital platform operators face a double bind. On one hand, the region’s young, tech-savvy population is a growth engine for digital services. On the other, these same demographics are prime targets for increasingly sophisticated scams, including AI-generated fraud and social engineering via social media and gaming platforms. As the UNODC notes, “existing security measures simply cannot cope” with the pace and complexity of these threats. The absence of a coordinated “trust layer” for digital identity and transaction verification is now a systemic vulnerability.

Policymakers must recognize that the cyber scam crisis is not a temporary blip but a structural threat to sovereignty and economic legitimacy. Criminal networks are not just stealing money—they are undermining the rule of law, corrupting officials, and weaponizing digital infrastructure against the very states that host them. As one recent analysis concluded, “This inaction reveals broader cracks in ASEAN’s capability to address transnational human rights issues, calling into question the organization’s future as a keystone of the new Asia-centric world order”.

Our Viewpoint: The Strategic Imperative for a New Digital Trust Compact

The unchecked proliferation of cyber scam centers in Southeast Asia is not just a law enforcement challenge—it is a strategic crisis that threatens the region’s economic trajectory, investor confidence, and social fabric. Temporary crackdowns and isolated regulatory wins will not suffice. The criminal networks are too agile, too well-capitalized, and too deeply embedded in the digital economy to be uprooted by conventional means.

What is required is a new digital trust compact: a coordinated, cross-border strategy that integrates regulatory harmonization, public-private intelligence sharing, and investment in next-generation identity and fraud detection infrastructure. This is not just about protecting consumers; it is about safeguarding the legitimacy of Southeast Asia’s digital future. As the UNODC warns, the region stands at a “critical inflection point.” Failure to act decisively will not only embolden the scam syndicates but could irreparably damage the promise of Southeast Asia’s digital century.

For founders, investors, and policymakers, the message is clear: digital growth without digital trust is a hollow victory. The time to act is now—before the cancer spreads beyond cure.