Deepfakes become part of organized crime’s industrial technology stack

In coverage of how generative AI technology and deepfaked biometrics have transformed the fraud landscape, the word “scale” comes up frequently. From a desk in an office in a city somewhere, it can be difficult to comprehend what that really means in terms of size, reach and organization.

A new UN report provides some context, delving into online scams in the Asia-Pacific region, which has become the epicenter of industrialized scamming operations. The UN estimates that online fraud, often through sophisticated investment scams, cost victims across APAC up to $114 billion in 2025. “What began as a regional crime threat in parts of South-East Asia has become a global organized crime crisis,” the report says.

“These are fully fledged organized crime economies, dependent on cross-border networks, specialized roles, illicit labour, logistics, corruption, shared financial systems, and a maturing criminal service infrastructure.”

Criminals like growth as much as your average businessman, and generative AI has handed them an engine that allows them to pump out deepfakes for online fraud at machine speed. Moreover, this is not a specialized tool: something as simple as a fake police background can be replicated infinitely with not much more than a simple copy-paste command.

“Generative artificial intelligence has dramatically reduced the technical barriers and workforce requirements for conducting sophisticated fraud, enabling criminal operators to generate convincing phishing content, deploy real-time deepfake video and voice during live calls, and target victims across dozens of languages simultaneously.”

The low threshold of entry for generative AI tools also means that technological investment can be diverted to other assets – such as space, infrastructure, and coercive force.

Singaporeans victimized on multiple levels

A recent episode of the CNA Podcast looks at the issue from a Singaporean perspective. While chunks of Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia are the geographical center of the fraud crisis, Singapore is among the nearby countries that provides fraudsters with targets, workers – and, sometimes, funding.

Asha Hemrajani, Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, says the explosive growth of online fraud, driven by its transformation into an industrialized transnational business, has made it attractive for certain investors. And it’s spreading beyond the regional center, too: Hemrajani notes that scam farms can now be found in other Southeast Asian countries, African countries and elsewhere. And a Singaporean investor was recently charged for investing in Southeast Asian scam operations.

The point is, these scams are being marketed as attractive to both the greedy (for profit) and the desperate (for work). Many recruits are lured with glossy promises, then trafficked into forced labor. Transnational reach and complex playbooks help criminal networks appear – and operate – as successful corporate enterprises.

Shufti data shows deepfake fraud surging by 600%

The UN’s assessment aligns with new data from identity verification provider Shufti. A new whitepaper looks at the implications of online fraud in APAC for the biometrics and identity verification industry. A release announcing the report identifies a troubling gap: while Asia-Pacific now accounts for close to 60 percent of global economic growth, “many of the digital-first businesses behind it verify their customers with systems that cannot keep pace with the region’s fraud and regulatory challenges.”

“The KYC Compliance Challenge Across APAC” argues that outdated verification systems are a barrier to growth – but, also, that advanced digital economies make the best targets.

“Fraud-signal rates per 1,000 verifications ran from a high of 22.82 percent in Indonesia to 2.57 percent in Malaysia, with New Zealand, India, Australia, Japan, and Singapore all near the top,” it says, while “Thailand, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, where digital infrastructure is less developed, sat at the bottom.”

Digital maturity means more remote onboarding; “the more verification a market runs, the more attack surface it presents, and the more fraudulent attempts surface at the verification step.”

“What our data makes clear is that fraud scales with digital maturity, not with weak defences,” says Ammara Mukhtar, regional vice president of sales APAC at Shufti. “The most digitally advanced markets in Asia-Pacific are experiencing the highest levels of fraud activity while regulators continue to introduce new compliance requirements at an unprecedented pace.”

As is true across the globe, Asia’s regulators are now engaged in a race against sophisticated fraud tactics bolstered by generative AI. A number of countries have taken steps to address the threat, but the risk is moving faster than the rulebook. And complexities across language systems mean document fraud detection remains a patchwork affair. Shufti contends that “an engine that cannot read this diversity caps the number of markets a business can credibly serve.”

The answer, in Shufti’s view, is to make use of its comprehensive stack, developed in-house and not dependent on licensing any outside tech – “one in-house stack where OCR, document authentication, biometric matching, liveness, and deepfake detection are all built internally.”

Per the release, the platform also routes verification through national digital-identity rails where they exist, including Aadhaar via DigiLocker, Singpass, ConnectID and PhilSys.

Article Topics

AI fraud  |  APAC  |  deepfake detection  |  deepfakes  |  financial crime  |  fraud prevention  |  Shufti  |  United Nations