UNODC warns young gamers lured into online gambling

New Delhi, July 21 (AHN) Young gamers are at risk in South-East Asia, including India, with criminals using the same structure of online casinos to gamify online gambling and make it appealing to them.

The dangerous mix of online gaming’s highly addictive nature and mobile accessibility is putting young users at risk, a new report released in Bangkok, Thailand, by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on Tuesday said.

“The line between online gaming and online gambling is becoming more and more blurred,” UNODC regional representative for South-East Asia and the Pacific Delphine Schantz said. She explained that while online gaming initially refers to interactive digital play without mandatory monetary stakes, the two sectors have converged through design features that deliberately exploit this ambiguity, making the crime more dangerous.

The report, titled An Interconnected Criminal Ecosystem: Transnational Organised Crime Threat Assessment for Southeast Asia 2026, also documents scam operations, drug trafficking, illegal gambling, online child sexual exploitation, tobacco crime and firearms trafficking.

It highlights how once-fragmented, locally rooted syndicates have merged into a single transnational, tech-driven criminal economy sophisticated enough to outpace conventional law enforcement and threaten governance, economic stability and development in the region and beyond.

Schantz said groups that once stayed within their own geographic domain and criminal speciality are now operating across multiple illicit markets at once, relying on the same service streams. “Their operating model looks like corporate franchising: imagine specialised departments for laundering money, trafficking people, smuggling migrants and harvesting data, all plugged into the same, service-based interconnected network,” she added.

The document reveals how criminals are weaving different types of crime into a single, shared financial and operational infrastructure. Organised crime in the region is also shifting from trafficking physical goods to selling services – cyber-enabled fraud, criminal infrastructure and platform-based financial settlements – that leave little trace and are harder to seize or attribute to any single actor.

Combined annual losses from scam offences across East Asia, South-East Asia, Australia and New Zealand are estimated at between USD 88.3 billion and USD 114.1 billion for 2025 alone, a sum that, even at the low end, outstrips the GDP of several countries in the region.

There is also a surge in trafficking in persons for forced criminality. Individuals from at least 80 countries and territories have been identified in scam compounds in the region, with recruitment networks documented as operating through multiple transit hubs in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Hundreds of Indians have been rescued from such compounds operating along the Myanmar–Indonesia border, where they were lured with promises of jobs in the software industry and then forced to work as slaves for online scammers.

According to the report, communication channels linked to South-East Asia’s scam industry point to growing efforts to widen the recruitment pool toward Europe and North America, with advertisements targeting individuals with German, Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French, Swedish, Norwegian and English language skills.

UNODC lead analyst Inshik Sim said the growth has fuelled an entire ecosystem of ancillary services, many operating under the appearance of legitimate commercial activity. “The scale and complexity of this expanding organised crime economy are outpacing existing responses, which were not structured to address such sophisticated criminal activity,” he noted.

The Golden Triangle remains the region’s main drug production hub. The combined annual retail value of the methamphetamine, ketamine and heroin markets is estimated at between USD 75 billion and USD 109.7 billion, underscoring the resources available to organised crime groups. Evidence now points to a strong expansion of synthetic drugs, heroin and cannabis from South-East Asia trafficked into Africa, Europe and South Asia.

Beyond the Golden Triangle, the Sulu and Celebes Seas Triangle has emerged as an increasingly important smuggling corridor for transnational organised groups from within East and South-East Asia and beyond. The maritime triangle, connecting Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, allows illicit cargoes to be embedded in legitimate trade flows. This includes technology enablers of scam operations, such as low-earth orbit satellites, moved undetected through the tri-border maritime region.

The report also explores emerging technological trends, including generative AI, deepfakes, and automated fraud that requires minimal human interaction. “Malvertising,” the exploitation of legitimate advertising networks to deliver malware passively and at scale, has become a highly efficient channel for cybercrime, with incidents rising 42 per cent year-on-year in 2025.

“A counter-organised crime strategy focused on disruption alone does not work,” Schantz said. “We have to address all the drivers, including prevention and following the money. Seizing criminal proceeds hits these networks where it hurts, and makes potential victims more cautious. To follow the money, in the new crypto context, law enforcement in the region needs specialised training to identify, seize and recover these funds,” she added.