There is a full-fledged crypto infrastructure in Southeast Asia and Africa that is fully controlled by organized criminal groups (organized crime groups), according to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

This is not just about money laundering, but about creating entire systems with exchanges, tokens and logistics with the participation of corrupt structures and using artificial intelligence (AI).

In Cambodia and Myanmar, organized crime groups have built their own illegal exchanges, launched stablecoins, and processed more than $24 billion in cryptocurrencies through the Huione Guarantee platform since 2021. In 2025, the service introduced its own blockchain, while remaining outside the scope of licenses and regulators.

Illegal mining farms are on the rise in Africa. There are crypto labs with thousands of employees in Nigeria, Zambia and Angola, some of them imported from Southeast Asian countries. It is noted that there are also many "scam centers" in Latin American countries, with roots stretching back to Southeast Asia.

Criminal structures actively use encryption and decentralized protocols: from deepfake content generation to phishing automation and transaction anonymization. There has been an increase in the supply of tools for bypassing KYC on crypto exchanges and creating fake documents.

In the United States alone, the damage from fraudulent schemes using cryptocurrencies in 2023 amounted to $5.6 billion. The global spread of organized criminal groups using these schemes is observed in East and South-East Asia, said Benedict Hofmann, regional representative of the UNODC, in an accompanying message.

"It's spreading like cancer. The authorities are fighting this in one region, but the roots are not disappearing anywhere — they are just migrating," said Hofmann.

According to him, a situation has emerged in which the region has essentially turned into an interconnected ecosystem run by "sophisticated syndicates" who freely exploit the vulnerabilities of official systems, endanger state sovereignty, and corrupt political decision-making processes and other government systems and institutions.

The UN warned that traditional regulatory mechanisms are not keeping pace with the evolution of digital crime. The organization calls for international coordination and updating of approaches to combating money laundering through cryptocurrencies.

A year ago, a UNODC report talked about a "parallel banking system" for criminals, in the creation of which cryptocurrencies played a major role. At that time, the United Nations named the USDT stablecoin from Tether as the leading money laundering tool in Asia.

Be careful and please take care of yourself.