cyber-crime
Latest Interpol review shows how scams continue to dominate, and AI-enabled attackers prove too hot to handle for cash-strapped regions
Cybercrime now accounts for more than 30 percent of all offenses across the Asia and South Pacific (ASP) region, according to the latest figures from Interpol.
The international cop shop said on Wednesday that the region has seen “a dramatic increase” in the number of recorded cybercrimes, driven largely by an uptake of digital infrastructure, new technologies, and the increasingly organized nature of criminal networks.
Interpol’s latest ASP Cyberthreat Assessment Report states that online scams and phishing attacks dominate cybercrime in the region. Data taken from 2024-2025 shows that phishing campaigns have matured beyond the spray-and-pray mass emails of yesteryear and now resemble the more sophisticated techniques deployed elsewhere in the world.
Targeted spear phishing is more common nowadays, and the growing use of AI helps even low-skilled script kiddies to apply a layer of authenticity to their attacks.
The region’s problem with organized scamming gangs that run camps where hundreds of people are compelled to commit crimes is especially pronounced and well-documented.
A United Nations report published last year described scam call centers across Southeast Asia as an epidemic that is metastasizing across the region “like a cancer.”
These compounds can be found across countries such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines, and often see vulnerable individuals trafficked into the scam centers to work under poor conditions – or even as slaves.
Interpol cited Singaporean research, which estimated the regional scam industry generates close to $40 billion each year.
AI tools, especially those capable of generating convincing deepfake imagery, have also proven popular with cybercriminals across ASP, just as they have beyond the region.
In 2024, the same scam compounds were found using deepfake imagery to support romance scams.
In February 2024, an employee at a multinational business in Hong Kong was duped into authorizing a $25 million payment because the faces of company execs were convincingly deepfaked on a video call.
A similar case was also reported in Singapore in March 2025, when a finance director at a different multinational was tricked into transferring more than $499 million following a Zoom call in which fraudsters assumed the identities of company chiefs, including the CEO and CFO.
Interpol’s report highlights how cyber threats are evolving into large-scale challenges for multiple jurisdictions, and no longer represent relatively uncommon, isolated incidents.
Sumary of offenses
Infostealers and banking trojans represent the second most-pervasive cybercrimes across ASP behind scams. Affecting individuals and organizations, infostealer infections often lead to large-scale frauds and ransomware distribution.
Speaking of which, ransomware came in just behind infostealers. Interpol described it as “a significant regional threat” that is leading to “significant financial losses.”
Attackers are adopting common tactics such as double extortion and using them to target critical infrastructure, healthcare, and large enterprises.
More than 135,000 ransomware attacks were recorded in 2024, and ransomware was also deployed in 51 percent of all data breach cases.
While digitization across the region is growing, opening new economic opportunities for these countries, law enforcement agencies are struggling to keep pace with the increase in cybercrime. Many lack the skills and tools needed to investigate these crimes.
The issue is especially pronounced in developing countries and small island states in the Pacific, which face “significant resource and capacity constraints,” and are thus more vulnerable to direct targeting in attacks by criminals who have a greater chance of evading consequences.
Neal Jetton, cybercrime director at Interpol, said: “The findings in this report highlight a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape across Asia and the South Pacific, where cybercriminals are leveraging artificial intelligence, ransomware-as-a-service models, and sophisticated social engineering techniques on an industrial scale.
“As digital adoption accelerates across the region, strengthening operational cooperation, information sharing, and cyber resilience remains essential to protecting communities and critical infrastructure.”
Some improvement
Interpol lauded many jurisdictions and governments within the ASP region for their proactive approaches to countering cybercrime growth.
Hong Kong and the Republic of Korea are two areas that have made strides by introducing new cybersecurity legislation, while others have established national task forces, codified national action plans, and launched awareness campaigns.
But even in more developed countries globally, and those with more mature cybersecurity regulatory and legislative landscapes, the issue of increasing rates of cybercrime persists.
While Interpol does not collect cybercrime figures for other regions, such as Europe and North America, in the same way that it does for ASP, it’s easy to see that problems persist everywhere.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes crime rates by type across England and Wales each year, and while computer misuse offenses in 2025 decreased by 58 percent compared to 2017’s figures, there were still an estimated 735,000 cases across the year.
Expanding the data to look beyond pure cyber offenses to cyber-supported crimes, such as banking and credit fraud, these offenses account for more than 2.7 million of the circa 9.6 million total crimes committed.
The FBI in the US produces its annual IC3 report examining the rates of cybercrime across the country.
Although it doesn’t compare it to total offenses or other crime types, the latest report reflecting 2025’s figures showed cybercrime reports topped one million for the first time, and total losses reached a record $20.87 billion. ®