UN Analysis: scam networks caused $114 billion in damages in 2025 — cryptocurrencies became their financial backbone
The scale of organized fraud in East and Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand has reached astronomical levels. Based on my assessment using data from relevant agencies, the total damage from scam operations in 2025 amounted to between $88.3 and $114.1 billion. This is not just statistics — it is a marker of a systemic crisis in the fight against financial crime.
It is important to understand: these figures are a conservative estimate. The methodology includes both officially recorded losses and the estimated share of victims who, for various reasons, do not contact law enforcement. Differences in the classification of fraudulent schemes between countries also introduce adjustments. For comparison, in 2023, similar losses were estimated at $18–37 billion. A roughly threefold increase in two years is not just a trend, but a full-blown epidemic.
Geography and Infrastructure of the Criminal Underworld
The leaders in officially recorded losses for 2024–2025 were China ($5.1 billion), the Republic of Korea ($3.5 billion), and Taiwan ($2.8 billion). But this is just the tip of the iceberg. We are witnessing a fundamental restructuring of the regional criminal economy. Disparate syndicates have transformed into cross-border networks with a unified infrastructure, combining fraud, money laundering, human trafficking, and illegal migration. This model, which some experts compare to corporate franchising, allows criminal groups to scale their operations effectively.
The key element of this system has become the so-called scam centers — isolated compounds where people are detained and forced to participate in investment and romance scams. The scale and complexity of this criminal economy, in my opinion, already outpace existing countermeasures.
Cryptocurrencies: A Parallel Financial System for Criminals
Of particular note is the role of cryptocurrencies, primarily USDT on the TRON blockchain. This combination has essentially created a parallel financial system for nearly instant, cheap, and pseudonymous cross-border transfers. Criminal groups actively use P2P platforms, over-the-counter brokers, and underground banking networks to convert fiat into stablecoins and back, effectively bypassing banking controls.
As I have repeatedly noted in my analyses, simply interrupting transactions without confiscating crypto assets is fighting symptoms, not the disease. As long as the revenues of criminal networks remain out of reach, they will rebuild their infrastructure.
Technological Escalation: AI and Satellite Communications
Criminal groups are actively adopting advanced technologies. Generative AI, deepfakes, encrypted messengers, and even satellite internet (including Starlink) have become part of their toolkit. AI lowers the barrier to entry for complex fraud schemes: small groups can now use automatic translation, character generation, phishing, and voice cloning. The 42% year-over-year increase in the use of legitimate advertising networks to distribute malware is clear evidence of this.
Satellite internet, in turn, makes criminals less dependent on local telecom operators, allowing them to operate in the most remote and inaccessible areas.
Global Recruitment and Network Resilience
The geography of recruitment extends far beyond Asia. Citizens of at least 80 countries have already been found in scam compounds. Requirements for knowledge of European languages in job ads presumably linked to scam centers indicate an expansion of reach into new markets. At the same time, forceful pressure on individual sites does not yield long-term results: networks simply change jurisdictions, fragment operations, and rebuild at new nodes.
My conclusion as an analyst: We are on the threshold of a new era of organized crime, where cryptocurrencies, AI, and satellite communications form a technological triad that renders traditional methods of combating it largely ineffective. Without global coordination among law enforcement agencies, training them to work with crypto assets, and creating a unified monitoring system, the damage from such networks will only grow. The current $114 billion is likely just the beginning.