LETTER | Southeast Asia is often celebrated as a region on the rise: expanding middle classes, booming digital economies, and deepening regional integration.
In 2024, the region’s 11 economies reached a combined GDP of nearly US$4 trillion (RM16.35 trillion), with growth projected to climb further in 2025.
Foreign investment surged even as global flows contracted, and unemployment across much of the region remains comparatively low.
But this picture of prosperity hides a growing crisis, and one that feeds on the increasing vulnerabilities of marginalised communities.
While regional wealth has increased, economic inequality, unsafe migration pathways, and labour shortages continue to create conditions that organised criminal networks exploit.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) identifies Asia and the Pacific as the region with the highest number of people in forced labour globally. More than 50 million people worldwide are estimated to be living in conditions of modern slavery, including forced labour and forced marriage.
Human trafficking remains one of the principal mechanisms through which many people are exploited into these conditions. In fact, forced labour generates “an estimated US$236 billion annually”, according to the ILO and is now deeply woven into Southeast Asia’s economic landscape.
Scam compounds and trafficking
The theme for this UN Day Against Trafficking in Persons is “Trapped Behind the Scam”, and it draws attention to one of the fastest-growing forms of exploitation in Southeast Asia - the trafficking of people into online scam compounds for forced criminality.
This is a form of forced labour that devastates victims on both ends of the crime and destabilises communities.
Recent findings show the scale of the crisis:
Tens of thousands of people are currently held in scam compounds along the Myanmar-Thai border, controlled by transnational criminal networks. Thailand has become a major transit hub for victims trafficked into these centres.
Asean governments are increasingly aware of the threat, and cooperation has intensified - but current efforts fall far short of the scale and sophistication of the criminal networks involved.
Victims from at least 66 countries have been trafficked into online scam centres, with 74 percent brought to compounds in Southeast Asia.
Scam-compound trafficking has become a multibillion-dollar industry, with coercive infrastructures documented across Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and border zones.
These centres thrive on familiar vulnerabilities: unemployment, debt, displacement, and unsafe migration pathways. Criminal networks understand desperation, and they are weaponising it.
Response is encouraging, but insufficient
Across the region, anti-trafficking responses still rely heavily on raids, rescues, prosecutions, and awareness campaigns. These efforts matter, and Asean’s growing recognition of forced criminality is a positive step.
But they are not enough.
The rapid evolution of transnational organised crime requires a broader systems approach. Addressing trafficking linked to scam compounds demands stronger labour and migration governance, as well as closer integration between anti-trafficking, cybercrime, and financial crime responses.
It requires more effective intelligence sharing and mutual legal assistance across borders, and long-term investment in victim identification, protection, and survivor reintegration.
Without addressing these interconnected systems, criminal networks will continue to adapt faster than the responses designed to stop them.
Malaysia is not immune
The scamming industry is not a peripheral problem. It is a regional exploitation economy that now reaches into every Malaysian household, business, and digital device.
Malaysia has seen a dramatic surge in scam-related losses, with national online fraud losses jumping from RM1.57 billion in 2024 to RM2.97 billion in 2025, according to the Home Ministry. In just the first five months of 2026, losses already reached RM830 million, signalling that the upward trend continues.
Certain scams dominate Malaysia’s losses. Losses from non-existent investment scams amounted to RM1.46 billion in 2025, recording a massive increase from RM848.62 million the year before.
Telecommunications scams, including the use of phone calls, SMS, messaging apps, or VoIP services to deceive victims into giving away money, personal information, or access to their accounts, cost Malaysians RM802.47 million last year, almost double the losses from the year before.
Malaysia’s National Scam Response Centre (NSRC) has frozen RM32.49 million in scam-related funds since 2022, returning RM10.9 million to victims, but the figures show this is only a fraction of the losses.
When regional vulnerabilities deepen, criminal networks grow stronger. When Asean’s response lacks frontline insight, exploitation spreads and Malaysia, like its neighbours, will continue to bear the consequences.
A region of growth for all
Southeast Asia has the ambition and resources to build an economy where growth does not come at the cost of human freedom. But doing so requires a fundamental shift: policy must be shaped with, not just for, those who confront exploitation every day.
Survivors, migrant worker advocates, and frontline anti-trafficking networks hold insights that governments cannot access from conference halls or boardrooms. They know where protections fail, where recruitment becomes coercion, and where economic pressure turns into exploitation.
A serious regional strategy must embed labour and migration policies that are co-created with frontline experts and incorporate survivor-led recommendations.
Asean must also acknowledge that partnerships with frontline stakeholders will be critical to protecting our people, and allocation of resources and critical funding needs to reflect this relationship.
The region must strive to build a model of growth that includes the least amongst us, and this can only be done through collaboration: governments, civil society, labour unions, survivor leaders, and regional networks working together to dismantle the structural vulnerabilities that make exploitation profitable.
Without addressing these structural drivers, organised criminal networks will continue to exploit the gaps between jurisdictions faster than governments can close them.
On this UN Day Against Trafficking in Persons, Southeast Asia must confront a simple truth: the problem of human trafficking and forced criminality is growing; it affects all of us, and current responses - while encouraging - are not yet equal to the scale of the crisis.
Freedom will not be secured through growth alone. It will be secured when those who have survived exploitation help shape the economic future of the region.
The writer is director of the Asia Freedom Network, a group that exists to strengthen regional systems that prevent and respond to human trafficking and human rights violations across Asia.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of Malaysiakini.
