New UNODC report reveals scale of South-East Asia’s ever more interconnected criminal economy
UNODC
South-East Asia’s criminal ecosystem has undergone a fundamental restructuring, according to a new report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 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. “What we are seeing is a shift in which groups that stayed within their own geographic domain and criminal specialty are now operating across multiple illicit markets at once, relying on the same service streams,” said Delphine Schantz, UNODC Regional Representative for South-East Asia and the Pacific, during the report launch today in Bangkok. “Their operating model looks like corporate franchising: imagine specialized departments for laundering money, trafficking people, smuggling migrants, and harvesting data, all plugged into the same, service-based interconnected network.”
