Southeast Asia's scam economy
Industrial-scale fraud runs out of compounds across the region, staffed in part by trafficking victims and supplied by online marketplaces that sell every component of the work. We follow the enforcement actions, the marketplaces behind them, and the losses on both sides of the transaction.
The Makati meeting's listed outcomes skip online scams, the joint statements are still unpublished, and Singapore takes over the AMMTC in 2027.
21 Oct 2026 Singapore Asks ASEAN Ministers to Back Anti-Scam Code for Online Platforms at Manila Crime MeetingAt the 20th AMMTC in the Philippines, Goh Pei Ming pitched baseline platform safeguards and a cross-border asset-recovery guide. The meeting's joint statement is still to come.
17 Oct 2026 Forest City Scam Suspects Face Six Months at Most. China Just Sentenced Scam Bosses to DeathSeven men charged over a fake crypto scheme in Johor face a general cheating charge, as Malaysia waits for its new Cybercrime Act to take effect.
15 Oct 2026 US Report Finds a 'Government Pattern' of Trafficking in Cambodia's Scam CentresThe State Department kept Cambodia at Tier 3, saying officials profited from scam compounds and no scam-centre trafficker was prosecuted despite Operation XXL.
15 Oct 2026 Singapore and Google DeepMind Build a Scam Detector That Reads Chats Only on Your PhoneGovTech fine-tuned Gemma on local scam conversations to warn users in real time without sending messages to anyone. It is not yet in any app.
15 Oct 2026 IMF and World Bank Publish a 12-Point Plan for Fighting Online Fraud in FinanceThe Bangkok Blueprint, drawn up with the Bank of Thailand, calls for accountability beyond banks, including platforms and telcos. It is guidance, not law.
12 Sep 2026 A Banking Trojan Now Hides Inside Android's Work ProfileThe isolation that keeps an employer out of your personal apps also keeps a bank's malware checks away from the cloned copy of its own app.
11 Sep 2026 Xinbi Guarantee Moved $24 Billion. The Seizure Took $52.8 Million.The United States seized the marketplace's Telegram channels and restrained $52.8 million, about two tenths of one per cent of what the platform has processed since 2022.
7 Aug 2026 Southeast Asia Hosts the Scam Compounds. East Asia and Australasia Lose the MoneyUNODC puts 2025 scam losses at US$88.3–114.1 billion across three sub-regions. On its own breakdown South-East Asia accounts for 8.4 to 13.2 per cent of them.
3 Aug 2026 Singapore's Cyber Command Ran Its First Scam Sweep. It Was the Third in Six WeeksSingapore stood up a dedicated Cyber Command on 3 July. Its first islandwide scam sweep was the third such operation in six weeks, and the smallest.
6 May 2026 Singapore Lost S$1.1 Billion to Scams in 2024 — AI Voice Cloning Is Making It WorseSingapore lost S$1.1 billion to scams in 2024. AI voice cloning and deepfakes are making traditional awareness-based defences less effective. Here is what changed.