general
Interpol: Cybercrime Now ~30% of All Crime in Asia-Pacific
2026-06-19
Interpol's 2025/2026 Asia and South Pacific Cyberthreat Assessment is not light reading. Across more than half of the 18 Southeast Asian and Pacific Island countries it surveyed, cybercrime now accounts for around 30% of all reported crime. A third of those countries logged more than 10,000 online scam cases in the reporting period, and several reported losses north of $100 million.
What's driving the numbers
The threat list is depressingly familiar. Online scams sit at the top, powered by social engineering, spear-phishing, smishing and AI-generated messages that are getting harder to spot at a glance. Behind them: infostealers and banking trojans, ransomware, deepfakes and coordinated misinformation, and business email compromise.
TrendAI figures cited in the report put the volume at 6.5 billion threats detected and mitigated across the region in 2024 alone. That's the kind of number that stops meaning anything after a while, but it gives a sense of the background noise security teams in the region are working against.
Speed of adoption, slowness of defence
Interpol attributes much of the surge to how quickly digital services have rolled out. Cloud computing, mobile banking, remote work and AI tools have all landed faster than the security frameworks meant to support them. The consequences are predictable enough:
- Cloud environments running with limited safeguards
- Incident response that's patchy or non-existent
- Almost no meaningful cross-border intelligence sharing
On the other side of the ledger, the scam compound industry in Southeast Asia has grown from a niche concern into a serious operational threat, employing thousands of people (many of them trafficked) to run industrial-scale fraud against targets across the region and beyond.
Some movement on the defensive side
It's not all grim. Most of the surveyed countries have launched some form of public awareness campaign and rolled out law enforcement training. Two-thirds are now using AI tools for forensics, predictive analysis and threat detection, which is a sharp uptick from previous assessments.
The harder question is whether any of that catches up with the criminal economy on the other side. Awareness campaigns work when people see enough of them often enough to actually change behaviour, and that takes years to embed. AI-assisted forensics helps after the fact, but the criminals are using the same tools to make their lures more convincing in the first place.
The bit worth sitting with
A 30% share of all reported crime is a remarkable line to read in a national crime statistic. For decades, cyber sat in its own category, slightly separate from "real" crime in the public imagination. That distinction is gone in much of the region. When a third of what gets reported to police involves a screen, a scam, or a stolen credential, cybercrime stops being a specialist concern and becomes a mainstream policing problem.
Whether the next Interpol assessment shows the gap narrowing or widening will say a lot about whether the response is keeping pace, or just keeping busy.