As cyber fraud nears $362B by 2028, Davos 2026 leaders examine ways to stop scams, shield victims, and strengthen digital systems worldwide.
At Davos 2026, leaders warned that cyber fraud is no longer “just about stolen money. It’s also about stolen lives,” as industrial-scale scam centers blend online deception with human trafficking and tech-enabled coercion. Thailand’s foreign minister described Southeast Asia as an epicenter driven by “instability” and “lack of rule of law,” noting Thailand repatriated 10,000 people lured or trafficked into scam work, and cautioning syndicates are now “challenging the power of state authority.” Interpol’s Valdecy Urquiza said the model has already globalized since 2022, enabled by real-time digital payments, social media recruitment, and unprecedented criminal adoption of AI that makes scams harder to detect.
Anne Neuberger argued “we never crossed the point of no return,” but urged faster cross-border law enforcement, platform partnerships, and consistent crypto AML implementation to match adversaries’ speed. IJM’s Gary Haugen emphasized the human and operational Achilles’ heel: authorities often know compounds “by street address,” and survivors provide “a gold mine of evidentiary and criminal intelligence.” Panelists converged on a playbook: capacity-building for local enforcement, harmonized legal frameworks (including the new UN cybercrime convention), rapid information sharing, and public-private action to disrupt the full ecosystem, not just relocate it.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. For those people joining us here in Davos, Switzerland, and for all those joining us online for this session on cybercrime has real victims. My name is Jeremy Jurgens. I'm managing director at the World Economic Forum and have responsibility for our Centre on Cyber Security. Today's session is looking to address cyber fraud. And this is something that's no longer just about stolen money. It's also about stolen lives. Industrial scale scam centres across the world are blending online fraud with human trafficking and tech enabled coercion, trapping workers while targeting victims globally. This fraud is estimated to exceed $360 billion by 2028. Today's session will explore what can be done to disrupt these operations, and how we can protect these exploited workers and build resilience in the digital economy and in our society. With me today, I have to my left Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Thailand, also joined by Valdesi Urquiza, secretary general of the International Criminal Police Organization, also known as Interpol. We have Anne Neuberger, distinguished fellow at Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Gary Helgen, chief executive officer at the International Justice Mission. Now for today's session, I would actually like to open up and would enjoy to come first to you, Minister. And recently we've seen the attention that's been placed on Southeast Asia is a focal point for many of these industrial scale operations. From Thailand's perspective, how is cyber enabled fraud evolved in the region and why is it so difficult to contain?
Thank you. Thank you very much. You know, my government is very, very concerned because this is, a growing challenge. And as you said, it's not just about money stolen, but about stolen lives. And unfortunately, Southeast Asia has emerged as the epicenter of these illicit activities, much of it because of instability. Much of it is about the lack of rule of law. But my concern is about the magnitude of the challenge. You know, before these were fly by night operations. Right now, there are major industries and many people are involved, like in in the region, the numbers are in the hundreds of thousands. And the people who are involved are coming not from the region, but they're coming from Africa. Even in Europe, Central Europe, you know, where there's a war going on, you know? So and last year we had to repatriate 10,000 of, of these people who have been either lured, coerced or trafficked to into working for these syndicates. And the the amount of money involved is mind blowing, you know, billions, hundreds of billions of US dollars. You know, whether the revenues that they raise or the money that people have lost, you know, and so we really have to do something about it. The other concern I have is these crimes have taken on greater speed and more sophistication. They're utilizing latest technology, especially digital technology and AI, you know, so it's difficult to keep pace with what the new technologies being employed. And my real concern now, of course, is about power. Before, you know, they were evading crackdown by government authorities, but now they're challenging the power of state authority as well. And if we don't do if we don't act now, we will have a situation like in Latin America where you have the drug cartels not just challenging, maybe sometimes being part of state authority. So this is why I'm concerned. And and I think we really have to work together to, you know, to take on, and tackle and combat this challenge. Thank you.
Great. Thank you. Minister. Secretary Urquiza, I'd like to come to you next. And I'd like to understand from Interpol's perspective how widespread and also profitable we heard about the money involved here. What have you seen in terms of how widespread and profitable these operations are, and particularly, how are the networks targeting victims outside the region? I have to say, you know, before we started looking into this, I wasn't aware that this kind of cross-national aspect, not only on the victims, but as well in the supply chain.
Thank you, Jeremy, and good morning, everyone. As the minister mentioned, this is a highly profitable activity and it is widespread. We sounded the alarm the first time in 2022 at Interpol when we have identified the first scam centers operating in a more structured way. And, what we see, and this is also based on all the interaction we have with global law enforcement, is that what initiated as something located in Southeast Asia now is also located in different regions of the globe? And this is expanding, and I don't believe we're still seeing the end of this expansion. It's very profitable. And also, there are a few enablers, that we observe that have been, supporting the expansion of those centers. The first one is, the development of the digital means of payment. So it's becoming easier for the victims to transfer considerable amounts of funds, in real time. And also, it's becoming easier for the criminal organizations to transfer those funds, to different jurisdictions. Second, it is it's the use of social media and other platforms to advertise, on, some of those scams, not only targeting the victims of these scams, but also targeting, individuals that would be then trafficked to work on those centers. And finally, Jeremy and this was mentioned by the minister as well, is the adoption of, technology by criminals to conduct their activities, especially with AI. So the level of, adoption of AI that we are seeing, with those criminal organizations is on levels that we didn't see before with any other technology. This is helping them, operate in a larger scale. It's helping them also, to become more effective in targeting their victims. And it's really becoming very difficult for the victims to identify when they are, being, scammed or when they are being lured, to work on those centers.
Great. Thank you. And we've heard here about this risk that these scam operations could actually become at the scale and size, that it may actually start to disrupt states. And also on the asymmetry in terms of the capabilities, the speed and agility of these actors relative to both the victims and sometimes those that are trying to intervene. You've been a key architect and a number of initiatives on ransomware looking at these different vectors. Have we crossed the point of no return?
We never crossed the point of no return.
That's good news.
But building on it's a wonderful question, right? Because, as you noted, and as the two prior speakers noted, both the the nature of the threat crosses borders, both in the kinds of individuals who are lured to conduct some of these scams, as well as the financial networks and social media networks that are used to move money and to target victims. And as a result, the most effective mechanisms over the last number of years have been multi lateral efforts that have worked in a cross-border way to attack that. So, for example, just in the last few months, you had a group of countries coming together, having worked with the private sector, to trace the digital breadcrumbs of these operations, to take down a broad set of scammers, hundreds of people, hundreds of millions of dollars in a set of countries. The challenge often is with these efforts that the adversaries evolve technologically very quickly, and sometimes the pursuit efforts take far longer, and the rules and regulations of how digital pursuit happens is often still constrained in border related geographic things. So while we see new types of cooperation between Interpol, Europol, the US, FBI, law enforcement around the country, many of each country's operations are constrained by what they can do within and outside their borders. So there's a new type of multilateral law enforcement that's needed. So what you see is organizations working together. Similarly, the private sector has stepped up. There are organizations that now trace on the blockchain because the blockchain is public. They trace on the blockchain crypto funds as they move to help identify the and trace that and then, frankly, partner with virtual asset service providers in key countries to tackle that much. As I noted, law enforcement cooperation across borders, virtual asset service providers cross borders as well. Some countries implement something called the Financial Action Task Force anti-money laundering rules for crypto. Many don't. Some don't because they need the technical skills to implement it. And that's why some efforts have focused on helping countries. The Counter Ransomware Initiative brought law enforcement individuals from 70 countries, together with practical, focused efforts to show how certain operations were done to help countries learn and gain the digital skills, both for their own government efforts, as well as in partnering with some of the key private sector players who bring new data, new capability and reach to this problem.
Thank you. Anne. Gary, I'd like to come to you next. You know, there can be a tendency to look at these issues through the lens or the technical lens of cybersecurity, but through your work at International Justice Mission, could you also touch on the human dimension here? What this means for individuals? And when we see this trafficking, the coercion that takes place, could you help us actually look at this also through that lens?
Sure. We have teams on the ground in the in Southeast Asia and the region there who've worked with thousands of survivors of these forced scamming compounds. So we can have a really clear idea of what it looks like. First, I want you to just picture what a scamming compound looks like. It looks like the Belvedere Hotel that we walk past every day, except make it twice that size and increase the security tremendously with barbed wire and so forth around it. And you will find hundreds of these across these three countries in Southeast Asia, and they typically have 500 to 1000 people who are being held by force and abuse and assault, starved and beaten. If they don't make quotas and they are just hunched over a sweatshop of computers carrying out 24 over seven scam operations, around the world. And picture that there's hundreds of these, but also picture that international law enforcement actually knows exactly where they are by street address. Because, as is indicated, there's hundreds of survivors who've come out and told us where they are. And there are those breadcrumbs digitally that also can be coordinated to, identify where they are. So the picture now is actually not tens of thousands of these, but there's 4 or 500 in these three countries that have stolen somewhere between 50 and $85 billion just last year. So this is sort of the most outrageous thing, is that right now we actually know where the compounds are. So if you if you miss out on the tens of thousands of these victims, you'll miss out on not only a massive human rights catastrophe that's taking place, not only a massive financial catastrophe, but a massive human rights capacity. But you'll miss out on a gold mine of human intelligence about exactly how the operations are going on. This is the Achilles heel of these operations. Imagine if you had to run a criminal network with tens of thousands of unwilling participants, thousands of which make their way out and can provide all the information you need about who's doing this, where are they doing it, and how are they doing it. So if we miss out on this gold mine of evidentiary and criminal intelligence, I used to be a prosecutor. And if I had this case, I would have everything I would possibly need to be able to pursue accountability. And that's why I believe at the end of the day, it's going to be physical inspection of these facilities. That is going to be the complete Achilles heel, because if there can be international physical inspection of 4500 facilities and don't even go to that, just go look at 5 or 6 of them. You will find when you go in thousands of people who are held against their will, all the forensic and physical evidence you need to know who's doing it, how they're doing it, and, where they're doing it. So I think there's the day before sort of this session at Davos about fighting this. And now there will be the day after this. And I think there's a very positive future.
Thank you for that, Gary. Now we have a kind of broader perspective, but our understanding of the challenge, I'd like us to come to actually what we can do to disrupt it. To your point, what does that day after look like? And and you spoke to the importance of cooperation, right. Transnational cooperation. What's there? Where do you still see the gaps in coordination and where would you prioritize these, next day efforts?
Yes. I love the way Gary described the way the operations occur. So essentially, the operations are most successful in ungoverned physical spaces and ungoverned online spaces, whether that's social media or the crypto ecosystem. And when there's international cooperation between governments and companies, you push back the ungoverned right. We would often have a joke in, in the US government that the Seychelles was the home of a lot of virtual asset service providers that weren't following, you know, anti-money laundering cryptocurrency policies. And there were endless numbers of government officials who really wanted to go do technical training of the Seychelles government. But all kidding aside, you know, I think there's three sets of things. One is there's technical training of countries that do want to cooperate, right, to ensure that there are law enforcement has the skills. I believe the U.S. FBI is now embedded with the Thai police force as a key partner, because there's nothing like sitting shoulder to shoulder, exchanging intelligence information and working together. The second thing is getting the partnership of core platforms. I mentioned virtual asset service providers, social media platforms, particularly in an era of deep fakes. Deepfake voice. Deepfake video is a real issue, particularly for people who are vulnerable. Need somebody to talk to. Folks may have heard the term pig butchering, right? Kind of targeting vulnerable people, making them think they're in a romantic relationship and then scamming them badly. So that's where technical platforms can help detect that AI is generating a new round of scamming threats. AI on defense to help detect and block it is tremendously needed because adversaries are adapting very quickly. So I think that's what the next generation looks like. Technical cooperation across platforms to find the digital breadcrumbs and block them. And then the technical cooperation really across governments and governments and with those platforms to then drive that to action, because the enforcement action is in both sets of hands.
Yeah. Thank you. Secretary Christie, I'd like to come back to you. And from your experience, how do we make sure that when we have law enforcement disrupting these operations, that they're not just being displaced to someplace else? What what have you seen that actually can lead to, you know, closing them down, you know, fully or completely there.
It's important, Jeremy, that, operations targeting those scam centers, address the entire ecosystem, not only the centers. If not, they will resurface everywhere. And, what we've seen that has been effective in situations like this. First is to build capacity for law enforcement in the countries where these scam centers are operating from. If you don't have all the tools, if you don't have the capabilities for the agencies to investigate to prevent those type of crimes, they will operate freely. This is something that we are working on right now at Interpol, helping, developing, helping with the development of, anti-scam centers in a couple of countries. And this was mentioned by all our, panelists here today. It's about multilateralism. There is no way you can fight this sort of threat, working as isolated. We have, platforms such as Interpol, Europol, the work of IJA that helps connecting law enforcement, help connect all the agencies working on this. And on this aspect, we are also developing some interesting activities. One is the Interpol task force, for, fighting scam centers where we get, and this is in implementation phase where we get, law enforcement agencies from the impacted countries to cooperate together, using Interpol platform, to investigate those crimes. But it's also about a multilateral legal framework, because you do need all countries to have the same level of legal, system to identify and to be able to, prosecute those crimes. And an important, achievement was made recently with the UN convention for cybercrime. That hopefully will help in establishing this legal, minimal framework that is needed. But finally, it's also important to develop more public private partnerships. This is key to address this type of threats. We we talk not only about information sharing, where we understand that there is critical information that, with, private sector that is necessary for the investigation of those scam centers. But also the fact that law enforcement can provide information back to the private sector. At Interpol, we developed, an initiative called I checked where we are able to screen, clients or potential clients from financial institutions and highlight if they could represent a threat, if they are known by law enforcement as, individuals, connected with criminal activities. And also about operational support from the private sector. We saw how key it is, to, take down websites to take down, ads, that would be used for those sort of criminal activities. And, having private sector entities operating in a very proactive way. It's absolutely key.
Great. Thank you. I'd like to come back to this point on multilateralism and particularly and this is for you, Minister, what is the role of diplomacy in addressing this and actually helping achieve those kind of multilateral cooperation that we've heard is necessary?
Well, as I emphasized at the beginning, the magnitude, the scale of this problem, this challenge, and, you know, it's beyond the the responsibility of Interpol alone, governments have to act, you know, and so because of its transnational character. And so we I like to emphasize the need for partnership, partnership not only between governments and private sector, but partnership among the international community. That's very important because, you know, if you look at one of the constraints in terms of combating, online scams is the loopholes that we have, the gaps that we have in terms of laws among in between countries. And so we really have to harmonize laws and we have to maybe make new laws, also new rules, new frameworks. And for instance, a convention on cybersecurity was signed recently in Hanoi. I think that's a major step forward. The other thing I think is the diplomacy must be involved. Government must be involved because these activities, the operation of these syndicates are taking place in countries where there is, instability, where there is poor rule of law or lacking of rule of law. And so governance is very important. And, and therefore governments will have to be, you know, working together. And then in the end, it's really about how to get our act together. And that involves political will. You know, we have to raise the level of attention on this challenge. And Thailand, we just organize an international conference combating online scams in particular, and we're trying to create a coalition of the willing. And this coalition of the willing will try, you know, bringing our concern actions to to various forums. Because what what we need to do is we have to connect the dots, connect the dots in terms of sharing of information, because we need many types of information, and we have to connect the dots in terms of enforcement, enforcement across boundaries. How do we do that? And capacity building that's very important because many countries lack the capacity. But the final point I'd like to emphasize is rapid, rapid, rapid information sharing, rapid response. That's otherwise we we playing a catching up game with these syndicates. Thank you.
Great. Thank you Minister I know we only have a few minutes left, but I want to come back to this human element. Right. And particularly focusing on victim protection survivor recovery. People don't fall into the same trap again. Right. How do we make sure that we build this into operations at the beginning, rather than treating it as an afterthought? What would you recommend that we can change there? Bring into the picture?
Yeah, I do think focusing on the humans will, first of all, what I predict the call for international inspections of these facilities is going to become almost irresistible, because if you have known sites where tens of billions of dollars are being stolen from citizens around the country, the call to just transparent international, inspection will, I think, become very high once they're inside. What they will then see is there are all of these tens of thousands of people who've been enslaved in these circumstances, and then they they have to be treated properly. And as you ask, like, what will be the key to treating them the way they should be in my mind by, first of all, if the if the mind frame is this is actually the solution to the problem, because these survivors actually have all the data and information that you could ever possibly dream of. Of who exactly are the operators, how do they do it, and what will it take to bring them to account? Now, I was just talking to a survivor this week, and he's he was trafficked from Bangladesh into one of these compounds. And when coming out, he's of course scared. What's going to happen to him? Is he going to be treated as a criminal in the immigration process? Is he going to be intimidated by the criminals? And so there's going to be this fierce fight over this, the human element where the criminals are going to try to bring violence to bear, to shut them up. But the international community can bring support and care to bear, to make them sing, not only sing because they'll be in freedom, but sing of all they know about these operations. So I think if the international community just sees that the solution to this problem substantially lies in treating well the survivors of this problem, I think we'll see our our way not only to the morally correct approach we should take, but also the actual practical solution to the problem.
Great. Thank you. I understand we may have time for 1 to 2 very quick questions. So if there are any questions from the audience, this is the opportunity to to bring them forward. Okay. I don't see anything there. Maybe I can actually just help bring what I took away from the session. I think one is just very impressed. Also this spring, this human element forward, I don't know that that's always captured, you know, when we think about cybercrime and all the technologies and finance and so on. But if we start with this human centric that also actually help us put in place the right approaches there, we also have this aspect of the speed which is taking place where these these industrial scale operations that are able to move much more quickly than both the institutions that are traditionally address them, and they have tools available to them, whether it's AI, deepfakes, voice cloning, etc., that actually give them a power, that is disproportionate to the individuals both being attacked as well as those that are trying to address them. And still on the challenging side, I think this aspect of governance and that we see it taking place in those domains in the cyber field or physically that are ungoverned. Right. And that also can help us identify and target those places you highlighted, Gary, you know, we know where these places are. And that brings us maybe the most important point. And you highlighted public private cooperation. And you also shared that with us. This is important that we will have to work across geographic boundaries, institutional boundaries, bringing in both civil society, law enforcement, technical operators and, you know, these different groups to collectively address this. And I think together, we can both mitigate the impact, but ideally address this and prevent it before it gets out of control. And we see it going into the domain that we've seen some other areas, in the cost that has on economy and most importantly on society. So I'd like to thank everyone for your participation today, both online and here with us in Davos. And thank my panelists for their contributions. Thanks.
Thank you.