INTERPOL Warns Cybercrime Exceeds 30% of Recorded Crime in Much of Asia-Pacific

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Cybercrime now accounts for more than 30% of recorded offenses in over half of the Asia and South Pacific countries surveyed by INTERPOL, according to a new regional threat assessment.

The report, based on responses from 18 member countries and covering January 2024 to March 2025, identifies scams and phishing as the region’s most widespread and financially damaging cyber threats. One-third of surveyed countries recorded more than 10,000 online scam cases.

INTERPOL said the rise has been fuelled by rapid growth in internet connectivity, mobile banking, cloud services, and digital finance, as wel as increasingly organized criminal networks. The region recorded more than 135,000 ransomware-related attacks in 2024, affecting sectors including manufacturing, financial services, and real estate. Distributed denial-of-service attacks increased by 92% year over year.

INTERPOL Cybercrime Director Neal Jetton said:

The findings in this report highlight a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape across Asia and the South Pacific, where cybercriminals are leveraging artificial intelligence, ransomware-as-a-service models and sophisticated social engineering techniques on an industrial scale.

Discussions of deepfakes on forums and Telegram channels used by Southeast Asian threat actors rose by 600% between February and June 2024. Meanwhile, 5.5 in every 1,000 people clicked a phishing link each month, around twice the global average.

More than 6.5 billion cyber threats were detected and mitigated across the region during 2024, according to private-sector data cited by INTERPOL.

The organization warned that many law enforcement agencies in the region lack specialist forensic tools, relevant training, and technical capacity. It called for stronger cloud security, faster intelligence sharing, and closer cooperation between governments, law enforcement, businesses, and civil society.