Southeast Asia scam losses reach $114.1B: UNODC report

Homepage > News > Business > Southeast Asia scam losses reach $114.1B: UNODC report A report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said that Southeast Asia’s scam industry has turned into an “interconnected criminal ecosystem,” of which losses are built from fraud and money laundering infrastructure. The UNODC—an international agency against illicit drugs, international crime, and terrorism—recently published a report titled “An Interconnected Criminal Ecosystem: Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment for South-East Asia,” revealing how criminals in Southeast Asia are similar to “corporate franchising.” “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 Southeast Asia and the Pacific. “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 UNODC said that comb...