By Kalinga Seneviratne
BANGKOK, Thailand | 28 July 2026 (IDN) — Speaking at the launch of the report ‘Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment for South-East Asia’ by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Bangkok on Wednesday (22 July), New Zealand’s ambassador to Thailand, Raylene Liufalani noted that these criminal networks are taking advantage of sophisticated technological advancements to extend their reach far beyond criminality itself.
“Transnational organized crime undermines economic growth, corrupts and threatens our communities, our public health and our security,” she said. “It challenges the rule of law and can erode public confidence, and government and state institutions. The transnational nature of organized crime means that no country can address these threats alone”.
This is the stark warning documented in the 255-page report by UNODC tilted ‘An Interconnected Criminal Ecosystem”. It says that in the past several years, a combination of geopolitical developments, the proliferation of industrial-scale scam centers, and the accelerating integration of emerging technologies into criminal operations have enabled organized criminal groups to expand both the scale and complexities of their operation.
Triggered By Destabilisation of Myanmar By Rebel Groups
The civil war in Myanmar has created breeding ground for scam centers to be located in so-called “autonomous areas” where the rebel groups are also believed to use such crime networks for fundraising.
The UNODC report carried a map that shows scam centers mainly concentrated in the Thai border areas within Cambodia, and inside Myanmar’s “autonomous areas” close to the China border.
Use of New Technology
These operations have expanded beyond transport and delivery of goods to service trade using digital technologies. These include cyber-enabled fraud targeting victims worldwide, and the movement and laundering of illicit proceeds through interconnected regional and international financial systems. It also includes human trafficking, not necessarily of unskilled labour, but people like IT professionals, to work in scam centers in Southeast Asia – especially in Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos.
Speaking at the report’s launch, Inshik Sim, the Lead Analyst and Research Officer for UNODC Regional Office in Bangkok said that the criminal facilitators include lawyers and accountants as well as maritime service providers. “They are servicing organized crime groups or simply providing their maritime transportation services” he said.
Sim says that drones are being used by the criminal syndicates for reconnaissance activities in the borders to warn against activity of law enforcement officials. “In the past when drug carriers were arrested, often they are found with a bulk of cash. But this is not the case anymore. The money is not done through cash. They use cryptocurrency,” he noted. “We have this evolution of technology (and) the global reach of transnational crime in the region was expanded …. our law enforcement regulatory authorities in the regions are responding to exploitation of technologies”.
Human Trafficking and Mushrooming Of Scam Centers
The UNODC report notes that criminal activities are now increasingly targeted at provision of services rather than solely trafficking in goods. A growing share of criminal revenue now derives from service-based operations and the report points to platform-based financial settlements, “operations that do not require physical commodities to cross borders, and generate proceeds that are substantially more difficult to trace, seize, and attribute to specific criminal actors mainly due to their virtual nature”.
The report attributes the financial losses suffered by the region’s population – across East and Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand – to an estimated USD 88.3 – 114.1 billion in 2025.
Liberal regulatory regimes designed to attract foreign investments to the region have been exploited by these criminal networks, which were initially Chinese nationals, but now expanded beyond that to transnational operatives. Sim pointed out that the money laundering specialists are now coming to the region from West Asia and Europe, and getting involved in the drug trade.
“What we really see now is a growing number of criminal groups from their different regions using some of the underground banking and some of the infrastructure that have been developed in this region to launder the process of their criminal activity, which is then being reinvested either in the financial institutions of this region or elsewhere,” noted Delphine Schantz, Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific of UNODC in Bangkok.
Crime Syndicates Are The Real “Terror” Threat To The Region and The World
In presenting the report to packed room of journalists at the Foreign Correspondents Club here, she said that what they are doing is presenting the facts to international groups, and that “any approach really has to be very holistic and very regional in nature. Because the moment a fraud is committed, it actually already probably is gone from the country and going to another country”.
Schantz argues that the focus needs to be on prevention. “That’s why we’ve helped launch a number of campaigns towards (warning) people (against) been lured into those job opportunities (in scam centers), which turn them into a kind of being forced into criminalizing,” she said.
Responding to a question from an Australian journalist, Schantz said that special economic zones with limited controls to attract foreign investment funds have provided openings to criminal groups. “Whenever there was no proper control of who are your investors and there was limited regulatory supervisory capacity to actually understand who will be investing in your country, (and where it was obscure) who was actually the beneficial owner of the company, you actually have limited control over whoever is going to bring money into the country,” she noted, adding that it helps crime to flourish.
While drugs, illegal gambling and money laundering are major areas of concerns, a new frontier that is opening up is an environmental issue, e-waste trafficking. The UNODC report warns that Southeast Asia is appearing to be a key destination for waste trafficked from high income countries. “Waste trafficking provides organized criminal groups with opportunities to profit by offering services at prices lower than the cost of complying with legal procedures” warns the report.
The report concludes by pointing out that criminal ecosystem has targeted financial institutions in four continents, and addressing this requires “not only capacity, but also operational and judicial inter-regional and international cooperation”.
“Use of cryptocurrencies, encryption communications. The use of satellites to allow remote actions. All of these things militate towards a very permissive operating environment for adversaries – organized criminals. Using the technology to their trade advantage,” laments, Troy Lulashnyk, Director General, Peace and Security Program Bureau of Global Affairs Canada, an invited international expert in the field, who spoke at the launch. “And we as governments, as societies really need to step up our game to counter the efforts. So that we don’t spend all
our time saying it is all terrible. And it is. But we have to very much move beyond diagnosis. We need to find spots where we can intervene”.
[IDN-InDepthNews]