Southeast Asia cyber scammers stole $37B in 2023 as AI-driven crimes soar: UN report

Southeast Asia has become a hotbed for cyber crime syndicates who have swiped as much as $37 billion last year through romance-investment schemes, crypto fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling, according to a new United Nations report.Cyber criminals in countries like Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos are using malware, generative artificial intelligence and deepfakes at greater rates to carry out the scams, the report by the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime found.“The transnational organized crime threat landscape in Southeast Asia is evolving faster than in any previous point in history,” according to the report, first cited by Fortune. Major organized crime groups have increasingly used under-regulated online gambling platforms and virtual asset service providers (VASPs) to move billions of stolen dollars into the financial system.“Organized crime groups are converging and exploiting vulnerabilities, and the evolving situation is rapidly outpacing governments’ capacity to contain it,” Masood Karimipour, a UNODC regional representative for Southeast Asia, said in a statement. “Leveraging technological advances, criminal groups are producing larger scale and harder to detect fraud, money laundering, underground banking and online scams.”Organized crime groups have trafficked hundreds of thousands of people into Southeast Asian countries and forced them to work in hotel and casino scam centers, according to a Bloomberg report.These scam centers have emerged across the globe, as well, according to Kimberly Sutherland, vice president of fraud and identity strategy at LexisNexis Risk Solutions.Tech experts at these scam centers are able to speak multiple languages and can converse with victims in their respective languages, which makes the scam appear more legitimate, Sutherland told The Post.As AI technologies have rapidly expanded, so have AI-driven crimes.Mentions of deepfake-related content across monitored underground marketplaces and cyber crime g...