Online fraud and deepfake crimes are outpacing the efforts of authorities to keep up, leaving a gap in the transnational criminal justice system. TaiwanPlus speaks with Joshua James, a U.N. regional coordinator for countering cybercrime, who helped author a new report detailing the extent of the problem.
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00:00How do these criminal groups operate at such a significant scale that they're able to steal 18 to 30 billion U.S. dollars in South and East Asia alone last year?
00:11These groups are using technologies that have been built to allow normal business to scale massively.
00:18Now, on the back of that advancement in technology and the ability to reach audiences around the world that, for example, social media loves,
00:28these criminal groups also had the backing of established money laundering channels
00:34and a long history of already being able to channel and flow a lot of money across borders, basically through things like drugs trade.
00:46They've done a lot, like we mentioned, with casinos.
00:48So that infrastructure was already in place to be able to move massive amounts of money via traditional kind of organized crime groups.
00:56So one of the factors in this is the people that are operating the scams.
01:01Your report suggests that many of these people are actually human trafficked and being illegally detained.
01:08Can you speak to the scale of the human trafficking going on here?
01:12And also, where do these victims come from?
01:15Let's just say that the problem is massive and specifically because, again, of economic opportunities and people looking for jobs, especially.
01:25So getting online, looking for a job, that sounds too good to be true.
01:29And then eventually you go across borders and that's kind of how the trafficking begins, is looking for legitimate job opportunities.
01:36In terms of who is, let's say, most commonly trafficked, it really depends on the scam centers.
01:45It depends on the organized groups behind it.
01:47It depends on who they're targeting.
01:49The report discusses how these fraud operations, these cyber-enabled fraud operations are becoming so advanced that law enforcement is really having a difficult time keeping pace with them.
02:01Can you discuss a little bit about what law enforcement and NGOs can do to catch up to these fraud groups?
02:09So criminal justice process still fits in that.
02:13We have to be much more agile and quick about how that process works.
02:17So there's some steps we can take there, just speeding up the way that criminal justice works in every country.
02:24NGOs fit in the picture by basically filling the gaps and helping identify, for example, what's happening online.
02:35Because law enforcement, if they're doing investigations, that's after the event has already happened.
02:39NGOs' role would be pre-incident to try a lot more on the prevention side, I would say.
02:45But really, if we want to address this, I mean, it's a global problem.
02:50Criminal groups, transnational organized crime groups are not thinking about countries.
02:54They're not thinking about borders.
02:56So we have to readjust the way that we think about international cooperation.