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With tens of billions of dollars flowing into regional economies from cybercrime, scam centers continue to flourish, despite international and law-enforcement efforts.
June 25, 2026
Criminal syndicates and groups continue to successfully profit from cybercrime in Asia and the South Pacific despite high-profile arrests and crackdowns, the result of the tens of billions of dollars in annual illegal revenue having created a resilient criminal ecosystem bolstered by local corruption, according to two reports released this month.
In its yearly review of incidents from the past two years, Interpol found that online scams now dominate crime in the region, with more than half of the group's member countries in Asia and the South Pacific reporting that cybercrime accounts for at least 30% of all nationally recorded incidents. Scam operations in Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, and the Philippines, many of them staffed by victims of human trafficking, generate an estimated $40 billion annually through romance fraud and investment scams, the international law-enforcement group stated in its report.
