Cybercrime accounts for 30% of all crime in Asia-Pacific as scam centers generate $40 billion

Cyber offenses now account for around a third of all crime across Asia and South Pacific

Cybercrime now accounts for more than 30 percent of all offenses across the Asia and South Pacific (ASP) region, according to the latest figures from Interpol. The international cop shop said on Wednesday that the region has seen "a dramatic increase" in the number of recorded cybercrimes, driven largely by an uptake of digital infrastructure, new technologies, and the increasingly organized nature of criminal networks. Interpol's latest ASP Cyberthreat Assessment Report states that online scams and phishing attacks dominate cybercrime in the region. Data taken from 2024-2025 shows that phishing campaigns have matured beyond the spray-and-pray mass emails of yesteryear and now resemble the more sophisticated techniques deployed elsewhere in the world. Targeted spear phishing is more common nowadays, and the growing use of AI helps even low-skilled script kiddies to apply a layer of authenticity to their attacks. The region's problem with organized scamming gangs that run camps where hundreds of people are compelled to commit crimes is especially pronounced and well-documented. A United Nations report published last year described scam call centers across Southeast Asia as an epidemic that is metastasizing across the region "like a cancer." These compounds can be found across countries such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines, and often see vulnerable individuals trafficked into the scam centers to work under poor conditions - or even as slaves. Interpol cited Singaporean research, which estimated the regional scam industry generates close to $40 billion each year. AI tools, especially those capable of generating convincing deepfake imagery, have also proven popular with cybercriminals across ASP, just as they have beyond the region. In 2024, the same scam compounds were found using deepfake imagery to support romance scams. In February 2024, an employee at a multinational business in Hong Kong was duped into authorizing a $25 million payment because the faces of company execs were convincingly deepfaked on a video call. A similar case was also reported in Singapore in March 2025, when a finance director at a different multinational was tricked into transferring more than $499 million following a Zoom call in which fraudsters assumed the identities of company chiefs, including the CEO and CFO. Interpol's report highlights how cyber threats are evolving into large-scale challenges for multiple jurisdictions, and no longer represent relatively uncommon, isolated incidents. While digitization across the region is growing, opening new economic opportunities for these countries, law enforcement agencies are struggling to keep pace with the increase in cybercrime. Many lack the skills and tools needed to investigate these crimes. The issue is especially pronounced in developing countries and small island states in the Pacific, which face "significant resource and capacity constraints," and are thus more vulnerable to direct targeting in attacks by criminals who have a greater chance of evading consequences. Neal Jetton, cybercrime director at Interpol, said: "The findings in this report highlight a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape across Asia and the South Pacific, where cybercriminals are leveraging artificial intelligence, ransomware-as-a-service models, and sophisticated social engineering techniques on an industrial scale. "As digital adoption accelerates across the region, strengthening operational cooperation, information sharing, and cyber resilience remains essential to protecting communities and critical infrastructure." Some improvement Interpol lauded many jurisdictions and governments within the ASP region for their proactive approaches to countering cybercrime growth. Hong Kong and the Republic of Korea are two areas that have made strides by introducing new cybersecurity legislation, while others have established national task forces, codified national action plans, and launched awareness campaigns. But even in more developed countries globally, and those with more mature cybersecurity regulatory and legislative landscapes, the issue of increasing rates of cybercrime persists. While Interpol does not collect cybercrime figures for other regions, such as Europe and North America, in the same way that it does for ASP, it's easy to see that problems persist everywhere. The UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes crime rates by type across England and Wales each year, and while computer misuse offenses in 2025 decreased by 58 percent compared to 2017's figures, there were still an estimated 735,000 cases across the year. Expanding the data to look beyond pure cyber offenses to cyber-supported crimes, such as banking and credit fraud, these offenses account for more than 2.7 million of the circa 9.6 million total crimes committed. The FBI in the US produces its annual IC3 report examining the rates of cybercrime across the country. Although it doesn't compare it to total offenses or other crime types, the latest report reflecting 2025's figures showed cybercrime reports topped one million for the first time, and total losses reached a record $20.87 billion. ®

INTERPOL Warns Phishing, Ransomware, and AI Scams Are Rising Across Asia-Pacific

A new report from INTERPOL has revealed a "dramatic increase" in cybercrime in Asia and the South Pacific, fueled by rapid digitalization, internet penetration, new technologies, organized criminal networks, and a disparity in cybersecurity maturity. According to INTERPOL's 2025/2026 Asia and South Pacific Cyberthreat Assessment Report, phishing has emerged as the most widespread and financially damaging form of cybercrime, with a third of countries in the region reporting more than 10,000 cases between January 2024 and March 2025. In all, over half of INTERPOL member countries have reported that cybercrime accounted for no less than 30% of all crimes recorded nationally. "The findings in this report highlight a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape across Asia and the South Pacific, where cybercriminals are leveraging artificial intelligence, ransomware-as-a-service models and sophisticated social engineering techniques on an industrial scale," Neal Jetton, INTERPOL Cybercrime Director, said in a statement. "As digital adoption accelerates across the region, strengthening operational cooperation, information sharing, and cyber resilience remains essential to protecting communities and critical infrastructure." The growing sophistication of cybercriminal tradecraft has led to a surge in ransomware attacks, as well as deepfake and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven scams that involve impersonating business executives to authorize fraudulent transactions. The region is estimated to have registered more than 135,000 ransomware-related attacks in 2024. A vast majority of the incidents impacted the real estate, manufacturing, and financial services sectors. This has been complemented by the industrialization of cyber-enabled scams by transnational organized crime syndicates in countries like Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines, who have set up extensive scam centers that make use of forced labor to carry out investment scams, preying on people across the world after building friendly or romantic relationships with them. "Organized crime in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos used deepfakes in 'romance baiting' scams, blending AI personas and social engineering to fuel $37 billion in regional cybercrime losses," INTERPOL said. Some of the other regional trends captured by the report include the following - * Banking trojans and information stealers materialized as the second most prevalent type of cybercrime, with malware families like RedLine, Lumma, LokiBot, Negasteal, and ZBot taking up the top spots. * 5.5 out of every 1,000 individuals in the Asia and South Pacific region clicked on phishing links monthly, nearly double the global average of 2.9 per 1,000. * Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks surged by 92% in 2024 compared to the previous year. * System intrusions accounted for approximately 80% of all data breaches in 2024. * Use of deepfake technology for sexual exploitation, blackmail, or coercion. * Exploitation of misconfigured systems, weak encryption, insecure APIs, and insufficient monitoring to breach target networks. * Ransomware groups weaponize companies' regulatory obligations to intensify pressure during extortion attempts. "In response, law enforcement organizations across the region - supported by INTERPOL - are scaling up joint efforts to combat cybercrime," INTERPOL said. "These include the coordination of operations against cybercriminal infrastructure, collaborative investigations, specialized training initiatives, and the creation of policies to improve cyber resilience."

Interpol reports a sharp rise in cybercrime and scams across Asia

A new regional assessment finds cybercrime now accounts for nearly a third of recorded crime in much of Asia, with industrial scam centres generating close to $40bn a year. The figure that reframes the problem is a share, not a sum. In more than half the countries Interpol surveyed for its latest Asia and South Pacific cyber-threat assessment, cybercrime now accounts for around 30% of all crime recorded nationally. That is the line that turns scams and phishing from a category of nuisance into a structural feature of the regional crime economy. When nearly a third of recorded offences happen through a screen, cybercrime is no longer a specialism. It is the main event. The report, published this week, describes a region where rapid digitalisation, new tools and increasingly organised criminal networks have combined to drive crime online faster than enforcement can follow. Phishing and related scam techniques have become the most widespread and most financially damaging form, with a third of the countries surveyed reporting more than 10,000 cases each. The pattern is consistent enough across borders to suggest coordination rather than coincidence. That coordination has a physical geography. In Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines, transnational organised-crime groups have built extensive scam centres, compounds that operate at industrial scale and, by Interpol's account, frequently rely on forced labour. The people inside are often trafficking victims, coerced into running the scams that target people elsewhere. The estimated take is close to $40bn a year, a number large enough to rival the legitimate economies of some of the countries that host the compounds. The tooling is what has changed most. Interpol describes criminals using artificial intelligence, ransomware-as-a-service models and sophisticated social engineering on an industrial scale, the same productivity logic that legitimate businesses apply to AI, turned to fraud. The most striking single statistic is the rise in deepfakes: the report cites a surge of more than 1,500% in deepfake-related fraud incidents between 2022 and 2023, with Vietnam and the Philippines among the hardest hit. A convincing fake voice or face removes the last instinctive defence most victims have, the sense that they are talking to a real person. This is the regional face of a global pattern TNW has been tracking. Interpol's separate global assessment put worldwide fraud losses at around $442bn in 2025, and the through-line in both reports is industrialisation: scams are no longer the work of lone operators but of organisations with hierarchies, recruitment, infrastructure and, increasingly, an AI stack. The same technologies that make a chatbot helpful make a scam scalable, and the criminal economy has adopted them with fewer scruples and less friction than most enterprises. The enforcement response has not kept pace, which is part of why the report reads as a warning rather than a victory lap. Crackdowns on individual compounds have produced raids and rescues, but the centres have proven adaptable, relocating across porous borders and reconstituting elsewhere when pressure rises in one jurisdiction. The forced-labour dimension makes the problem doubly intractable: dismantling a scam centre is also a human-trafficking rescue operation, and the victims running the scams are victims twice over. What Interpol is describing, in the end, is not a spike but a maturation. The scam economy in Asia has acquired the attributes of an industry, geographic clustering, labour supply, technological investment and a revenue line measured in tens of billions, and it has done so faster than the institutions meant to contain it could adapt. The 30% figure is the one to sit with. It says that for much of the region, the question is no longer how to stop cybercrime from growing, but how to police a category of crime that has quietly become the largest one there is. This report touches on human trafficking and forced labour. Anyone who suspects a trafficking situation can contact local authorities or national anti-trafficking hotlines for support.