Southeast Asia cyber scammers stole $37B in 2023 as AI-driven crimes soar: UN report

Southeast Asia has become a hotbed for cyber crime syndicates who have swiped as much as $37 billion last year through romance-investment schemes, crypto fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling, according to a new United Nations report.

Cyber criminals in countries like Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos are using malware, generative artificial intelligence and deepfakes at greater rates to carry out the scams, the report by the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime found.

“The transnational organized crime threat landscape in Southeast Asia is evolving faster than in any previous point in history,” according to the report, first cited by Fortune. 

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Major organized crime groups have increasingly used under-regulated online gambling platforms and virtual asset service providers (VASPs) to move billions of stolen dollars into the financial system.

“Organized crime groups are converging and exploiting vulnerabilities, and the evolving situation is rapidly outpacing governments’ capacity to contain it,” Masood Karimipour, a UNODC regional representative for Southeast Asia, said in a statement. 

“Leveraging technological advances, criminal groups are producing larger scale and harder to detect fraud, money laundering, underground banking and online scams.”

Organized crime groups have trafficked hundreds of thousands of people into Southeast Asian countries and forced them to work in hotel and casino scam centers, according to a Bloomberg report.

These scam centers have emerged across the globe, as well, according to Kimberly Sutherland, vice president of fraud and identity strategy at LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

Tech experts at these scam centers are able to speak multiple languages and can converse with victims in their respective languages, which makes the scam appear more legitimate, Sutherland told The Post.

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As AI technologies have rapidly expanded, so have AI-driven crimes.

Mentions of deepfake-related content across monitored underground marketplaces and cyber crime groups in the region increased 600% in the first half of 2024, the UN report found.

During the pandemic, human-initiated cyber attacks plummeted and bot attacks soared, Sutherland said. 

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But human-initiated attacks have rebounded thanks to advanced AI technologies, she said.

“We think it is very correlated to AI-driven attacks because AI-driven attacks are making it easier to create a legitimate-looking scam and it’s more difficult for businesses and humans to detect,” Sutherland told The Post.

The low barrier to entry, lack of effective governmental regulations and increased Chinese investments in Southeast Asia’s cyber sector have added to the growing problem, Irina Tsukerman, president of security strategy firm Scarab Rising, told The Post.

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While individuals with low levels of cyber literacy have typically been “easy prey” for scammers and digital natives have been able to identify scams, artificial intelligence has the potential to change this trend by creating more convincing schemes, Tsukerman said.

In the workplace, for example, deepfakes and voice cloning can imitate the images and voices of someone’s boss, Tsukerman said.

These same technologies can mimic the look of government reports or re-create signatures on client projects.

“To avoid being taken in by the increasingly street-savvy cybercriminals, corporations and governments should educate the public about these methods and encourage them to identify red flags in training videos and scenarios,” Tsukerman told The Post.