Asia's scam menace prompts rare China-Asean-UN unified response
China is joining forces with Asean and the United Nations to tackle the scam networks that have dug in across Southeast Asia, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said on Tuesday, as it warned that the region's criminal gangs were becoming more powerful, networked and were adopting AI to widen their pool of victims.
Cyber scams have harvested untold billions from victims in Asia and beyond over the last two to three years, many operating out of remote compounds beyond the reach of law enforcement staffed by workers who have been trafficked there and forced into crime.
Chinese nationals, some known fugitives, dominate the gangs that use online gambling, romance, cryptocurrency and foreign-exchange scams to target their victims - many of whom are in China or are part of the Chinese diaspora.
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To tackle the regional scourge, China has joined an action plan alongside the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and UNODC to take on the gangs and chase their illicit gains while protecting the people trafficked into the casinos and scam compounds of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines.
"Trafficking in persons connected to casinos and scam operations run by organised crime has mushroomed across Southeast Asia, particularly in the Mekong," said Jeremy Douglas, UNODC regional representative, referring to the river that runs through mainland Southeast Asia.
"There is an urgent need for regional cooperation to address these increasingly integrated and interlinked crimes in the region, as well as the ecosystem they exist in."
The broad strokes of the plan are to prevent "organised crime from infiltrating communities" and co-opting the economy and politics of the countries in which they operate, the text of the agreement says, as well as chasing down the proceeds of crime and "protecting vulnerable persons and victims from [further] harm".
Regional security officials say the money the scam gangs make is diverted through casinos and converted into hard-to-trace cryptocurrencies. It then finds its way into property and luxury goods from Bangkok to Singapore, the latter of which last month seized more than US$1 billion in assets linked to Chinese criminals' money laundering from online gaming and scam rooms.
"Addressing this issue in one or a few countries' domestic contexts, while necessary and welcome, will not have a significant impact," said Rebecca Miller, UNODC regional adviser on human trafficking and migrant smuggling.
"The plan the region has agreed to includes practical and targeted actions to address transnational crime comprehensively and strategically. Progress is being made, but more needs to be done."
The issue is made all the more urgent by the scale of the money the gangs are minting, which security experts say opens access to politicians and police in those parts of Asean where the rule of law is weakest such as Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.
So much money is being made that the UNODC estimates the scam gangs in one Southeast Asian nation it declined to name were raking in between US$7.5 and $12.5 billion per year - "reaching half the value of that country's gross domestic product".
Yet these groups are also often "remarkably open, in some cases presenting themselves as legitimate business entities or even philanthropists," the UNODC said.
Authorities in Cambodia and the Philippines have had some success shutting down scam compounds in recent months, with new operations springing up instead in the ungovernable border areas of conflict-ridden Myanmar near China and Thailand.
Chinese authorities have led cross-border raids on compounds in Myanmar's Shan State in recent weeks, freeing trafficked workers and making scores of arrests.
But the UNODC forecasts that Southeast Asia's scam centres will soon adapt and start to rely more on highly skilled tech workers rather than vast numbers of forced labourers trafficked into crime.
Artificial intelligence and translation tools that allow scammers to hit multiple different nationalities in seconds may lessen "the need for victims with diverse language skills", the UNODC said, replacing this with "a need for IT skills and/or experience using various social media platforms and communication channels".
Executives in Asia's business hubs are already reporting a surge of cybersecurity breaches by bots stealing sensitive company data and recordings of senior staff members' voices, which are then weaponised against employees and their clients to solicit payments.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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