BANGKOK: Scam gangs defrauded Asia-Pacific residents of at least US$88 billion in 2025, a United Nations office said on Tuesday (Jul 21), with transnational crime groups rapidly evolving tactics to stay ahead of law enforcement. Criminals in Southeast Asia, an epicentre for cyberfraud by mostly Chinese-origin syndicates, are outpacing crackdowns, diversifying revenue streams, exploiting corruption and harnessing artificial intelligence, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a new report. The report estimated scam losses across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand between US$88.3 billion and US$114.1 billion for 2025, a figure larger than the gross domestic product (GDP) of several of the nations in the region. Networks that once operated within specific territories or illicit trades are increasingly expanding across multiple illegal markets while using shared services, said Delphine Schantz, UNODC Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. “Their operating model looks like corporate franchising: imagine specialised departments for laundering money, trafficking people, smuggling migrants, and harvesting data, all plugged into the same, service-based interconnected network,” she said.