"Leveraging technological advances, criminal groups are producing larger scale and harder to detect fraud, money laundering, underground banking and online scams," explained Masood Karimipour, UNODC regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. This statement underscores the significant impact of technology, including AI and messaging platforms like Telegram, in facilitating a wide array of criminal activities across Asia, thus underscoring the urgency of addressing these evolving threats.
AI lowers barriers to entry. Generative AI is a key contributor to the expansion of criminal activity, because it automates tricky tasks like money laundering, coding malware, or gathering breached data. Crims can now buy these services or tools to run them from underground markets, making it easier and cheaper to execute cyber attacks. This highlights how technological advancements, particularly generative AI, are commodifying criminal services and enhancing their accessibility.
The technology is also helping to improve attacks that employ social engineering, thanks to audio and video deepfakes, translation apps, and face-swapping software. The report revealed a staggering increase, over 1,500 percent, in deepfake-related crimes in the Asia Pacific from 2022 to 2023, along with a 600 percent rise in deepfake-related advertisements on platforms like Telegram between February and July 2024. This rapid surge highlights the changing landscape of digital crime.
"Inflow of capital and expansion of markets has led to increasing professionalization among criminal operations and actors providing services to them," wrote the report's authors. This points to a concerning trend where organized crime is becoming more structured and corporate-like, establishing robust infrastructures to support their illicit activities, which poses significant challenges for law enforcement.
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