GI-TOC ¦ The 2025 Global Organized Crime Index - A Deep Dive into the Mekong Results

The Mekong’s Organized Crime Surge: How Synthetics, Scams and Online Child Sexual Exploitation Are Reshaping Financial Crime Risks

The 2025 Global Organized Crime Index shows a worrying, sustained rise in organized criminality across the five Mekong countries, with criminality increasing while resilience falls. Between 2021 and 2024 the Index recorded a continuous year‑on‑year rise in criminality across the Mekong, a 0.57‑point increase overall; certain markets — synthetics, human trafficking (including online child sexual exploitation) and financial crime — now exert severe influence across the region. Myanmar remains the highest scoring country globally for organized crime for a second year running and scores the maximum 10/10 for synthetic drug markets. That combination — explosive production of synthetic drugs, the spread of large‑scale online fraud/scam operations, and the rapid digitization of trafficking-related activity — is transforming how illicit proceeds are generated, moved and laundered, creating new pressure points for anti‑money‑laundering (AML) practitioners, financial institutions and regulators.

Why these trends matter for financial crime responders

The convergence of cyber‑enabled crime, large synthetic drug flows and online child sexual exploitation presents three key financial crime implications.

First, the volume and speed of illicit proceeds have increased and diversified: criminal proceeds now move not only from traditional drug sales but also from global scam operations and crypto‑enabled fraud.

Second, the channels used to place and layer funds are changing: payments rails, mobile money, alternative remittance systems, cryptocurrencies and opaque corporate structures are all being exploited, often across multiple jurisdictions.

Third, the actors and enablers are broader than classic hierarchical criminal groups: state‑embedded actors, foreign criminal networks, private‑sector facilitators (including telecommunications, utilities, real estate and professional services), and micro‑level offenders or “micro‑facilitators” have become central to the illicit economy.

Key drivers behind the shift

Connectivity and technology: improved infrastructure and greater digital penetration across the Mekong are a double‑edged sword. Connectivity supports legitimate development but also enables criminal actors to operate remotely and at scale, often in multiple languages and using encrypted or decentralized platforms that evade conventional monitoring.

Geography and displacement of criminal networks: Chinese criminal actors displaced by enforcement inside China and new configurations of armed groups in Myanmar have reshaped where production and illicit enterprises locate. Production hubs in Myanmar (notably within Wā State and other semi‑autonomous areas) have continued to generate massive volumes of methamphetamine. These outputs then flow into neighboring markets where distribution infrastructure and commercial channels facilitate onward movement.

Criminal market convergence: cyber‑enabled scams now intersect with human trafficking and drug markets. Scam compounds and online recruitment networks can produce proceeds that are laundered through both formal and informal channels; victims of online exploitation are trafficked and monetized; and traffickers increasingly use encrypted messaging, gaming platforms and social media to recruit and control victims.

State fragility and shrinking civil society space: resilience scores have declined for many Mekong states. Civil society and investigative space are increasingly constrained, reducing transparency and limiting community‑level early warning. Where criminality rises and institutions weaken — as in parts of Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam — the environment for financial crime becomes more permissive. Corruption and protection by state‑embedded actors further lower enforcement risk for criminals.

Bastian Schwind-Wagner _Follow

"The Mekong is experiencing a marked rise in organized criminality while state resilience weakens, driven by synthetic drug production, large‑scale online scams and the digitization of trafficking. This creates new, highly networked channels for illicit proceeds that exploit both local and global financial systems.

Responding requires updating legal frameworks, improving cross‑border cooperation and strengthening detection in local languages and digital platforms. A coordinated approach that combines financial intelligence, platform accountability and civil society engagement can reduce harm and make illicit markets less profitable."

How criminals exploit the licit economy

Criminals exploit legal trade, transport networks and legitimate financial services to hide illicit flows. Examples include:

• Mixing drugs into legitimate shipments or using commercial export routes to disguise consignments destined for regional or global markets.
• Using local banks, informal value transfer systems and professional intermediaries (lawyers, accountants, real estate agents) to layer proceeds into seemingly legitimate corporate investment.
• Building local infrastructures — compounds, telecoms, electricity, logistics — that rely on private‑sector suppliers who may be complicit, negligent or coerced, enabling both large‑scale online scamming and support for trafficking networks.
• Exploiting weak cross‑border cooperation to delay or avoid detection, leveraging jurisdictions with lower regulatory standards as placement points before laundering occurs in global financial centers.

Corruption’s role in laundering and facilitation

Corruption remains a central enabler at multiple points in the laundering chain. From placement (introducing proceeds into the financial system) to layering (complex corporate and transactional structures) to integration (investments, property and services), corrupt actors reduce friction and enforcement risk. Traditional AML frameworks require proving a predicate crime to charge laundering; some jurisdictions are moving toward liability based on suspicious behaviour or failure to undertake due diligence even if the underlying crime cannot be proven — a shift that can make prosecutions and asset recovery more feasible when predicate proof is difficult.

Regulatory and investigative gaps

Several systemic gaps limit effective responses:

• Legal frameworks are often outdated relative to modern, digital criminality. Laws drafted for offline trafficking or classic fraud do not always capture cyber‑enabled recruitment, encrypted communications, AI‑generated sexual material or scams organized through gaming and localized messaging apps.
• Language and platform coverage is insufficient. Global content moderation and transaction monitoring systems often focus on English or major languages, leaving local language content, gaming channels and regional messaging apps under‑monitored.
• Capacity and technology deficits for frontline investigators and prosecutors mean digital evidence, blockchain tracing, and transnational asset‑recovery exercises are harder to conduct and coordinate.
• Fragmented cross‑border cooperation delays action; differences in speed, legal standards and political will between partners produce gaps that organized crime exploits.

Opportunities and practical responses for financial crime actors

The Index and specialist experts suggest a set of complementary measures that practitioners, financial institutions and policymakers should prioritize.

1. Modernize laws and enforcement thresholds

   Jurisdictions should move toward legal frameworks that allow for action where money laundering indicators are evident even if proving the predicate crime is difficult. Expanding suspicious transaction reporting (STR) obligations and creating clearer standards for corporate transparency and beneficial ownership helps reduce layering opportunities.

2. Target the placement point and global integration nodes

   Because laundering becomes harder to detect the further funds move from their origin, countries and institutions located at global financial hubs should prioritize intelligence‑led investigations, rapid asset freezes and cross‑border asset recovery. Coordinated international financial intelligence unit (FIU) cooperation can make illicit proceeds less useful to criminals and increase the costs of operating from permissive jurisdictions.

3. Improve private‑sector accountability and safety‑by‑design

   Telecoms, social platforms, payments companies, gaming platforms and cloud providers must be part of multi‑stakeholder responses. Encouraging or requiring platform detection in local languages, proactive content moderation, standardized red‑flag indicators for trafficking and scam behavior, and rapid takedown/notification mechanisms will reduce harm. Financial institutions should adopt typology‑based transaction detection for scam flows linked to known compound geographies and known crypto exit rails.

4. Build investigative capacity and digital forensics at the frontline

   Invest in training for law enforcement and prosecutors in digital evidence collection, cross‑border information requests, cryptocurrency tracing, and victim‑centred investigation. Proactive, preventive policing strategies — including open‑source intelligence (OSINT) monitoring of scam platforms and gaming communities — can shift enforcement from reactive to preventive.

5. Strengthen regional cooperation and creative diplomacy

   Because some production and facilitation hubs are governed outside conventional national control, creative diplomatic and operational approaches are necessary. Engaging local power holders, regional neighbors and third‑party intermediaries to negotiate risk reductions, development trade‑offs and targeted interventions may reduce production and trafficking without unrealistic demands on fragile authorities.

6. Empower civil society, survivors and youth

   Civil society organizations often have the earliest, most granular insights into victimization and local markets. Programs that fund and protect NGOs, integrate survivor voices in policy design, support youth digital literacy, and build local reporting channels create resilience and improve early detection.

7. Leverage targeted sanctions and global financial pressure

   Sanctions, asset freezes and public naming of networks and enablers can create measurable disruption. Successful, high‑impact seizures in financial centers demonstrate that pressure from destination markets and capital centers can influence criminal ecosystems originating elsewhere.

Closing: the need for a coordinated, multi‑disciplinary response

The Mekong’s current vulnerability — rising criminality coupled with declining resilience — requires a pivot in how financial crime practitioners think about risk and response. The problem is at once local (compounds, community victimization, language‑specific online grooming), regional (cross‑border flows, production hubs, porous borders) and global (scam proceeds drained into global financial centers, crypto exit rails, diaspora victimization).

Financial institutions, regulators and AML professionals must work with civil society, tech companies, investigative journalists and diplomatic actors to align legal reforms, operational capacity and intelligence sharing. Practical steps — from updating laws that allow action without perfect predicate proof, to improving platform monitoring in local languages, to focusing enforcement where integration occurs — will reduce the profitability of organized criminal markets. The Mekong’s challenges are not purely local; they are a test of global systems’ ability to detect and disrupt highly networked, technology‑enabled illicit economies. The urgency is clear: without coordinated, creative and well‑resourced responses, the scale and sophistication of these criminal markets will continue to grow, and so will the financial pathways that enable them.

Acknowledgement

This summary draws on the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime presentation, which features the presenters.