A new United Nations report says illegal gambling in South-East Asia has become part of a wider criminal economy that is increasingly organised, digital and transnational. In the material reviewed by iGamingToday and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, China remains the main target market for these networks, while China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan together account for about half of global illegal gambling turnover.
The report places that global turnover at between $340 billion and $1.7 trillion. It says strict gambling prohibitions in mainland China have not removed demand, but shifted it abroad and online, with Chinese nationals forming the primary consumer base for the criminal networks.
The networks have also adapted their infrastructure to avoid detection. According to the report, operators use domain cycling and mule accounts, and many are licensed in jurisdictions such as the Isle of Man and Curaçao, while their servers are hosted in Eastern Europe and staffed from South-East Asia.
Cryptocurrency has changed the financial side of the business as well. The report says Chinese-language money-laundering networks now dominate the illicit crypto infrastructure and processed an estimated $16.1 billion in illegal crypto funds over the past year.
The broader UNODC report, published on 21 July, says South-East Asia’s criminal ecosystem has undergone a fundamental restructuring. Once-fragmented, locally rooted syndicates have merged into a single transnational, tech-driven criminal economy that now spans cyber-enabled fraud, human trafficking, migrant smuggling, drug trafficking, illegal gambling and money laundering.
Delphine Schantz, the UNODC regional representative for South-East Asia and the Pacific, said groups that once stayed within their own territory and criminal niche are now operating across multiple illicit markets at once, relying on the same service streams. She described the model as “corporate franchising”, with specialised functions for laundering money, trafficking people, smuggling migrants and harvesting data plugged into one interconnected network.
The report says illegal gambling did not emerge as a separate sector, but developed as an extension of earlier criminal portfolios. As enforcement tightened on offshore gambling infrastructure, the same groups added cyber-enabled fraud platforms to existing gambling structures and repurposed casino hotels, compounds and related financial networks as part of the criminal model.
Those sites have become hubs where a single location can house online gambling, cyber-enabled fraud, trafficking in persons and money laundering at the same time. The report says this gambling-fraud-trafficking nexus is both a financial crime challenge and a regional security concern.
The UNODC also says prohibition and weak enforcement across South-East Asia have accelerated links to transnational criminal groups. It says the Philippines’ ban on offshore gaming operators did not eliminate the operators, but pushed them into other markets including Cambodia, Myanmar and Indonesia.
Marketing has also moved with the technology. The report says mobile phone adoption and social media have changed how illegal gambling is sold, with influencers used to reach younger players and gamified interfaces used to lower barriers to participation and normalise offshore gambling where it remains prohibited.
The agency says young people’s exposure to illegal online gambling through social media has become a public health crisis that policymakers are struggling to address. It also points to a lawsuit filed last month by Thailand’s Consumers Council against Meta, alleging that scam advertising and online fraud spread unchecked, with Facebook still carrying large numbers of scam adverts, including gambling adverts.
The UNODC says the same criminal networks are increasingly converging with online fraud and trafficking in persons, using gambling both as a source of revenue and a way to launder funds. It adds that the same criminal principals, facilities and financial networks can sustain coercive infrastructure holding tens of thousands of trafficked people.
The wider report says criminal groups across the region are shifting away from trafficking physical goods and toward selling services such as cyber-enabled fraud, criminal infrastructure and platform-based financial settlements. It estimates combined annual losses from scam offences across East Asia, South-East Asia, Australia and New Zealand at between $88.3 billion and $114.1 billion in 2025.
UNODC says individuals from at least 80 countries and territories have been identified in scam compounds in the region, and recruitment networks now run through transit hubs in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Communication linked to the scam industry also suggests efforts to widen recruitment into Europe and North America, including ads targeting people with German, Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French, Swedish, Norwegian and English-language skills.
The report argues that responses built around disruption alone will not be enough. Schantz said authorities must address the drivers of the trade, including prevention and following the money, while the agency said law enforcement will need specialised training to identify, seize and recover crypto-related proceeds.
