Cyber-enabled fraud resulted in up to $37bn in losses for victims in East and Southeast Asia in 2023, with governments left unable to contain these threats, a United Nations (UN) report has warned.
The analysis by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) highlighted that organized crime groups in the region have rapidly integrated new tools and technologies to enhance their operations, including malware, generative AI and deepfakes.
Additionally, these gangs have opened up new underground markets and cryptocurrency solutions for their money laundering needs.
The report also found that the development of the cybercrime-as-a-service economy has been one of the most significant changes to take place within the regional threat landscape over past decades. This has significantly lowered the barrier to entry across a range of cyber and cyber-enabled crimes.
Masood Karimipour, UNODC Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, warned that the convergence of cyber-enabled fraud, underground banking, and transnational organized crime is “rapidly outpacing” governments ability to contain these criminal activities.
“Leveraging technological advances, criminal groups are producing larger scale and harder to detect fraud, money laundering, underground banking and online scams. This has led to the creation of a criminal service economy, and the region has now emerged as a key testing ground for transnational criminal networks looking to expand their influence and diversify into new business lines,” noted Karimipour.
Integration of Advanced Tech in Organized Crime
The UNODC described the integration of AI technologies by criminal groups involved in cyber-enabled fraud as a “particularly complex and alarming” trend in Southeast Asia.
This trend has been driven by the growing accessibility of generative AI tools, which have become a “powerful force multiplier” for criminal activities such as identity theft, fraud, data privacy violations and intellectual property breaches.
Criminal groups leverage these tools to automate phishing attacks, craft convincing fake identities and online profiles, and generate personalized scripts to deceive victims while engaging in real-time conversations in hundreds of languages.
Additionally, the UNODC said there is a strong indication that deepfakes are being used by crime groups in Southeast Asia for malicious purposes such as impersonation fraud, deepfake pornography, sextortion, and other cyber-enabled fraud schemes through the alteration of authentic video footage and audio.
The agency highlighted there was a more than 600% increase deepfake-related content targeting criminal groups in Southeast Asia across monitored online platforms in the first half of 2024.
AI tools, including jailbroken large language models (LLMs) are also being used to develop malicious code, including AI-generated ransomware, the report added.
Telegram a Primary Platform for Accessing Cyber Tools
Social media and messaging provider Telegram has emerged has one of the main platforms for accessing cybercrime tools and services, according to the report.
This includes Telegram groups distributing infostealers, which are used to steal high-value corporate credentials and banking and financial services credentials.
Telegram has also become a popular platform for accessing underground clouds of logs providers (UCLs), which offer access to scaled-up volumes of compromised confidential information at a small cost, mostly acquired through infostealers.
Telegram is also used to facilitate cyber-enabled crime is the promotion of deepfake software through underground marketplaces on the platform. These offer services such as precise real-time facial manipulation in video content.
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was recently detained by French authorities and questioned over the criminal use of Telegram. In September 2024, Durov committed the platform to working more closely with law enforcement, while also cracking down on illegal activity.