Southeast Asia Hosts the Scam Compounds. East Asia and Australasia Lose the Money

SINGAPORE, 6 AUG 2026 — The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime put a number on the region's scam economy in July: between US$88.3 billion and US$114.1 billion lost in 2025. The number travelled widely, usually attached to Southeast Asia, and often as the top of the range with the range removed.

The report's specifics change the story. The estimate covers three sub-regions, not one. And on the assessment's own breakdown, South-East Asia accounts for the smallest share of it.

Where the losses actually land

The figure measures what victims lost, sorted by where the victims live. On that basis, East Asia accounts for roughly seven-tenths of the total. Australia and New Zealand make up about a sixth, and South-East Asia the remainder.

This is not a quibble about attribution. The compounds are in mainland Southeast Asia — the report maps known, reported or raided scam centres across Cambodia, Lao PDR and Myanmar — and the enforcement burden falls on the governments hosting them. The money, overwhelmingly, is taken from people somewhere else.

That gap explains a good deal about why the problem has been difficult to move. The states with the strongest incentive to act are not the states with jurisdiction over the compounds.

Two different numbers, doing two different jobs

The assessment carries a second set of figures that is easy to confuse with the first, and the difference matters.

The US$88.3 to 114.1 billion range is an estimate, built from police and anti-scam centre records, regulatory data and crime victimisation surveys. Separately the report tabulates reported losses — what each jurisdiction's official figures actually record.

Read down the Southeast Asian entries and the spread is the striking part. Thailand reports US$767 million, Singapore US$699 million and Malaysia US$691 million. The Philippines reports US$7 million.

The Philippines is not a hundred times safer than Malaysia. A figure that low is a statement about what a country's reporting system captures and publishes, not about what its residents lost. The same caution applies to Cambodia at US$45 million, which is among the jurisdictions where compounds are concentrated.

This is the honest reading of the whole table: reported losses measure reporting. This is why the assessment builds a separate estimate rather than adding up official returns, whose aggregate comes to about a fifth of the estimate's floor.

The growth is the part nobody disputes

Against its own 2023 assessment, which put losses for East and South-East Asia at 18 to 37 billion US dollars, the report finds losses from those same sub-regions in 2025 running approximately three times higher. It attributes this to sharp increases in officially recorded losses in nearly every country, which rose to between 2.5 and 5 times their 2023 levels.

That is a rise in the measurement as well as in the crime, and the report says so. Both readings point the same way, and neither is comforting.

Why the industry does not sit where its victims are

The assessment describes an organisational model it calls explicitly franchised. Senior financiers and property developers own or lease the compound land and infrastructure. A middle tier of syndicate operators rents space and manages supervisory teams. A lower tier of trafficked workers is assigned scripts, quotas and target demographics, recruited through professional agencies in the source countries.

Underneath that sits a service layer: SIM card banks, mule account networks, and what the report describes as AI-generated multilingual content that lets low-skilled operators impersonate officials, romantic partners and investment advisors across several jurisdictions at once.

Multilingual generation is the detail that ties the geography together. A compound in a border zone does not need staff who speak Korean or Japanese to defraud people in Seoul or Osaka. Once the language barrier stops being a constraint, the profitable targets are wherever household wealth is highest, and the compound goes wherever land, protection and cheap coerced labour are available. Those two criteria point at different countries, which the map reflects.

The report also notes that where scam types are broken out, investment fraud accounts for the largest share of money lost despite a comparatively modest share of cases, while low-value shopping and e-commerce fraud dominates case volumes. Case counts and loss totals measure different crimes, which matters whenever a national figure moves.

The same split shows up in illegal gambling

Scams are not the only market arranged this way, and the parallel is the strongest evidence that the pattern is structural rather than incidental.

The assessment describes an illegal online gambling economy in which China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan are estimated to account for around half of global illegal betting turnover — a figure the report carries from earlier external work rather than generating itself. That demand, it says, is channelled from East Asian consumer markets through South-East Asian criminal infrastructure and into cryptocurrency settlement systems operating across multiple jurisdictions.

The geography is the same: consumers in one sub-region, operating infrastructure in another, and settlement in a third layer that belongs to no jurisdiction in particular.

What holds it together, on the report's account, is a shared enabling architecture: corruption networks, cryptocurrency settlement infrastructure, special economic zone concessions, and criminal-service platforms running on an as-a-service model. The report is direct about the consequence — this architecture confers a structural resilience that has consistently limited the impact of enforcement actions aimed at individual actors, and disrupted networks have a documented capacity to relocate, reconstitute and resume across jurisdictions.

The zones deserve particular attention. Formally registered legal entities, cross-border investment arrangements and territorial enclaves including SEZ concessions are, the assessment says, being used to conceal beneficial ownership, launder proceeds at scale, and create quasi-protected operating environments that substantially raise the evidentiary threshold for enforcement action.

That last phrase states the practical obstacle plainly. The difficulty is not only that a host government may lack the will or the reach. It is that the legal form of the operation is built to make proof expensive.

What this means for the region hosting it

For ASEAN governments the finding is uncomfortable in a particular way. The domestic case for a costly crackdown is weakest exactly where the compounds are densest, because the domestic losses there are smallest and, in some jurisdictions, barely recorded. The pressure to act arrives instead from outside the region.

For the three ASEAN members that do report substantial losses — Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia — the position is different again. They are simultaneously significant victim markets and neighbours to the host states, which is the combination most likely to produce joint operations rather than unilateral ones.

What to watch

Two developments would signal a change.

The first is whether any Southeast Asian jurisdiction's reported figure jumps by an order of magnitude without a corresponding change in the underlying crime. That would indicate a reporting system starting to work, and it would make the region's share of the estimate look larger for reasons that are good news.

Second, will the next assessment narrow its range? A spread of nearly US$26 billion between floor and ceiling reflects the quality of the underlying data. A narrower range would mean better numbers; a wider one would not.