Interpol reports a sharp rise in cybercrime and scams across Asia

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.

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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.