UN reports Southeast Asian scam networks cost victims $114B annually

Somewhere in Southeast Asia, a warehouse full of trafficked workers is running romance scams on your relatives. And business is booming. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime released its “Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment for South-East Asia 2026” on July 21, estimating that victims across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand lost between $88.3 billion and $114.1 billion to online scams in 2025 alone. To put that in perspective, $114 billion is roughly the GDP of Morocco. Gone in a year. To pig-butchering schemes and fake investment platforms. That number is approximately three times higher than what UNODC estimated just two years earlier, when regional cyber-fraud losses sat somewhere between $18 billion and $37 billion for 2023. Where the money disappears The geographic breakdown tells an interesting story. East Asia bore the brunt, accounting for roughly 71% of all financial losses. Australia and New Zealand absorbed between 15.8% and 20.2% of the damage. Southeast Asia itself, despite being ground zero for the operations, only represented 8.4% to 13.2% of victim losses. The UNODC labels Southeast Asia the “global epicenter” for these opera...