All news on the topic: Southeast Asia

U.S. prosecutors filed five civil-forfeiture complaints on July 21 seeking roughly $26.4 million in cryptocurrency traced through separate international fraud investigations.

Scams across East and Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand caused estimated losses of as much as $114.1 billion in 2025, according to a U.N. report examining the infrastructure shared by criminal networks.

The instructions were clear: He had four days to make each victim fall in love. And there were a lot of victims. Online, Safeer Mohammed Koorimannil, who was trafficked to a scam center in Myanmar, impersonated a 28-year-old Singaporean woman named Ella.

Astens of thousands are freed, female survivors are increasingly reporting gender-based violence in the compounds, previously thought to hold mainly men.

Thailand has issued an arrest warrant for a Chinese businessman featured in a Reuters investigation into transnational crypto-investment fraud, alleging he was part of a network that laundered money from scams and online gambling through illegal cryptocurrency mining.

Cybercrime now accounts for more than 30 percent of all recorded crime in more than half of the Asia and South Pacific countries surveyed by Interpol, according to the agency’s regional threat assessment.

Russian businessman Vadim Gurinov, known for longstanding ties to Kremlin-connected figures and sanctioned elites, allegedly used Singapore-based fintech startup Fingular to build an alternative financial ecosystem beyond Western oversight after the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Vadim Gurinov, ein langjähriger Freund und Geschäftspartner sanktionierter Personen, gründete nur wenige Monate vor dem groß angelegten russischen Angriff auf die Ukraine in Singapur eine Onlinebank namens Fingular.

Online scam operations exposed in a remote enclave, a national ID program reportedly breached by cybercriminals, stories of bags of cash arriving on private planes.

When the bombs detonated, they destroyed vacant office buildings and ruined echoing, multi-cuisine food courts. Dynamite brought down a four-story hospital, silent karaoke venues, empty gyms, and dorm rooms.

In a statement Thursday, South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the measures mark the country’s first independent sanctions regarding transnational crime and the “largest single sanction measure in history”.

The U.S. has sanctioned 19 individuals and companies in Southeast Asia, accusing them of running scam centre operations that use slave labour to defraud Americans of billions of dollars.

Merchants immediately moved to Tudou Guarantee, a rival in which Huione owns a 30% stake.