While almost everyone knows someone who has been scammed online, financial and data losses are often treated as individual instances of manipulation or run-of-the-mill criminal activity. Victims are often embarrassed over what they see as a personal failure in decisions on who to trust, and the narrative about prevention often focuses on improving public awareness. But evidence increasingly shows that scams are big business, with an entire ecosystem of specialized workers and targeted digital tools. Scam lifecycles run across numerous vectors of the modern economy — telecommunications, digital marketplaces and social media platforms, and financial ecosystems. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance estimates that total annual global losses to scams and fraud have hit a staggering $442 billion USD — for context, that’s a loss larger than the national GDP for approximately 150 countries. The scale of these losses and their knock-on effects for broader criminal ecosystems make online scams a global, national, and economic security issue.

Some governments and organizations have recognized the national and economic security implications and shifted their framing accordingly at the highest level — for instance, U.S. President Trump’s March 2026 Executive Order identifies transnational criminal organizations as responsible for running these operations and directs future initiatives to disrupt them. Australia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and other countries have taken a wide range of national responses to respond to the threat, including sanctioning criminal organizations, implementing national anti-scam strategies, and overhauling national laws and enforcement approaches. Globally, more than 45 countries endorsed the Global Fraud Summit’s 2026 Call to Action, which recognized fraud as a transnational threat, called for improved monitoring and information-sharing, and advocated for stronger public-private partnerships.

Despite these high-level moves, cyber scams are not yet broadly processed as a priority threat or resourced as such within national security bureaucracies. On the sidelines of the High-level Debate of the 81^st Session of the UN. General Assembly in September 2026, the Stimson Center’s Southeast Asia and Cyber programs collaborated with Meta to convene more than 20 experts from the private sector, UN agencies, national government, and civil society for a Chatham House Rule discussion about the national security and geopolitical implications of cyber scams and fraud, andhow the public and private sectors can better collaborate to counter them. The following are some key points that emerged from the dialogue.

Key Takeaways

1. Despite increasing policy and law enforcement interventions, online scams are largely still treated as a one-off crime rather than as part of an organized criminal operation that threatens international and national security interests. National security is a competitive and contentious space, and currently scams are not perceived primarily through a threat lens by all of the wide range of agencies involved. The perception of scam and fraud operations as an economic and security threat needs to be more widely adopted to ensure the issue is appropriately prioritized, on par with how other forms of transnational organized crime are treated. It was noted that recent raids and crackdowns on scam centers and compounds are often performative, with no real costs to the leaders of the criminal enterprises responsible. And the threat is broader than direct losses to scams, with significant overlap in the digital crime techniques and money laundering infrastructure used by scam operations and more traditionally recognized threat actors like drug trafficking syndicates or sanctioned entities. As happened with ransomware, there’s a need to widen the lens about scams beyond one-off instances to a broader organized crime issue, conveying the scale, the sophisticated network of perpetrators, and the big-picture impacts.
   
   
2. Economic vulnerability in both localities where scam compounds are based and international populations that inadvertently supply workers to scam operations is a complicating factor that highlights how a lack of viable economic options drives individuals toward fraudulent job offers and allows corruption to flourish. These crimes thrive in part because they attract resources to geographies which otherwise struggle to access legitimate investment, such as conflict zones in Myanmar. In some cases, local elites can be co-opted by criminal syndicates for both personal gains and short-term benefits to the local economy through demand for transportation, construction, and food. Focusing on state obligations to respond and exploring ways to motivate enforcement are crucial parts of an effective international response.
   
   On the other side of the equation, workers who take jobs in scam operations often do so under economic duress. These operations have a veneer of legitimacy — they operate like a business with specialized workforces and terminologies and have pipelines of online job offers to bring in workers. Sometimes, workers pursue an online job post for an international position and are deceived and trafficked into a scam compound; for example, the UN estimates over 300,000 people have been trafficked to scam compounds in mainland Southeast Asia. Sometimes, workers believe they are doing legitimate finance work but are money mules. And sometimes, people may be aware that scam activities are illegal but see no alternative given economic vulnerability. There is space to improve digital platforms’ content screening and moderation, for instance, which can make such jobs harder to find on mainstream platforms. But addressing the broader economic vulnerability and lack of job opportunities which push people into this sector is more complex. 
   
   
3. Crime moves as quickly as technology allows, but legal and policy responses must work through existing and often slow bureaucratic processes. The modern global financial ecosystem allows criminals to rapidly move funds across financial institutions and national borders in ways that were unthinkable a few decades ago, when the baseline structures for governance were established. Attention to this issue is growing at the national level in many countries, through multilateral convenings like the Global Fraud Summit and UN Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, and even through targeted regional tracks within regional blocs such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). But each line of engagement has its own processes and sensitivities to work through; even inside a country, there are jurisdictional challenges, unclear details about roles and responsibilities, and other obstacles to building effective responses across agencies. These processes inherently take time and are necessary to build buy-in and craft a response that is effective and replicable over the long term. International cooperation across jurisdictions is even slower. Providing clearer prioritization for tackling scams can help speed things up.
   
   
4. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but current legal and regulatory frameworks inhibit information sharing and rapid response mechanisms. Preventing a scam is far more cost-effective for industries and law enforcement than investing in complex and expensive investigations and prosecutions. However, effective prevention requires significant information-sharing along the scam lifecycle, because scam interactions with victims move across telecommunications networks, digital and social media platforms, and financial platforms. Each sector receives different sets of signals which together can indicate a potential scam, and thus information sharing between companies and across different sectors is crucial. However, many of the existing frameworks — such as anti-money laundering rules under the Financial Action Task Force and U.S. Bank Secrecy Act and broad privacy protections — were built for other purposes. They aren’t designed to support rapid responses to suspected fraud or scams. Improvements are needed to keep the entire ecosystem secure and ensure consumer privacy concerns while also providing safe-harbor for targeted, valid information-sharing across sectors, respond when accounts are suspicious but not necessarily proven to be engaged in fraud, and respond in real time for the purposes of prevention.

Next Steps

Online scam operations are constantly evolving, but dialogue participants stressed that there is a window of opportunity to prioritize this issue by elevating it as a national and economic security threat through diverse multilateral and diplomatic fora in 2027. The United States — which has recently taken a series of actions to prioritize combating transnational criminal organizations perpetrating online scams and fraud — will be leading the G7 in 2027. Vietnam will lead APEC in 2027 and has an opportunity to highlight this issue within the context of a focus on digital economic growth. And more broadly, companies that require digital trust to operate increasingly see erosion of that trust due to scams, fraud, and other bad behavior as an existential concern.

There is a need for continued dialogue like those at the September 23^rd roundtable about specific shifts in action and areas of collaboration — and in some cases, new angles of approach could support alternative approaches to combatting scams. There are case studies such as ransomware, where shifting the narrative from stories about individual instances of crime to a coordinated attack on crucial infrastructure, helped elevate issues — and where there is space for targeted analysis on how to do so successfully. Similar deep-dives into specific obstacles to information-sharing or halting bad behavior which could be alleviated by targeted safe harbor provisions could support sector-specific actions. And ultimately, situating cyber scams within existing state obligations in cyberspace offers a powerful, underused lever for elevating the issue on the international agenda and could unlock new ways to respond.  Each of these threads can be further unpacked.