Southeast Asia’s rapid digital transformation has unlocked economic opportunity, but it has also created new vulnerabilities in the form of increasingly sophisticated scams and fraud. As millions of people and businesses come online, many are exposed to evolving digital risk without the necessary safeguards to protect themselves. Scams today exploit not only technical loopholes but also human trust, behavioural habits and systemic gaps, leading to erosion of trust, mounting financial losses and growing social harm across the region.
Against this evolving threat landscape, there is a pressing need to explore how Southeast Asia can build resilience against digitally enabled scams and fraud. To address this, the Tech for Good Institute, in partnership with Bamboo Builders and with the support of Google.org, convened consultations and roundtables with experts across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. These discussions examined the challenges and identified ways the region can strengthen its defences as digital transformation continues to accelerate.
This report outlines the why, who, when, and how of building digital resilience across Southeast Asia. It aims to operationalise two key concepts: the Whole-of-Society Approach, which emphasises the importance of inclusive and coordinated participation, and the concept of Digital Resilience, which organises efforts across four stages of intervention. These approaches offer a foundation for a safer and more trusted digital environment in the region.
Key Findings of the Report
Scams in Southeast Asia are rapidly increasing in sophistication and scale, shifting from purely technical breaches to sophisticated psychological manipulation, with AI-generated deepfakes in the Asia-Pacific surging by 1,530% between 2022 and 2023. The financial damage is also alarming with victims in Singapore losing US$481.4 million in 2023. The United Nations reported up to US$37 billion in losses across East and Southeast Asia in the same year. Beyond financial harm, scams erode public trust, posing a profound threat to the long-term sustainability of the region’s digital economy.
Various challenges undermine the region’s fight against digitally-enabled scams and fraud in the region. This include:
- Rapid digital adoption has not always been accompanied by digital literacy efforts.
- Fragmented national responses lead to overlapping mandates, inconsistent victim support, and poor threat intelligence sharing.
- Cross-border scams flourish due to legal inconsistencies and limited operational coordination.
- Outdated laws fail to address new threats, such as AI-enabled scams, cryptocurrency laundering, and job scams linked to human trafficking.
Practical solutions already exist in SEA and can be scaled and adapted. These efforts can be seen across the entire scam and fraud stages:
- Protect: Ongoing digital literacy and behaviour-change campaigns, trusted community engagement, and platform safeguards.
- Identify & Detect: AI-powered detection tools, scam alert systems, SIM card verification, and grassroots reporting.
- Respond & Recover: National scam centres, coordinated law enforcement, victim-centred care, and cross-border asset recovery.
- Adapt: Regular legislative audits, scam drills, and scaling successful solutions regionally to stay ahead of evolving threats.
Roundtable participants across the region emphasised that efforts to build resilience against scams and fraud must be:
- Cross-Disciplinary: integrate technical, behavioural, policy, and design expertise to create holistic and innovative solutions that address scams from multiple angles.
- Cross-Sectoral: promote active coordination across government, industry, civil society, and media, ensuring all sectors share responsibility in building digital resilience and more coherent responses to emerging threats.
- Cross-Cultural: localised to reflect the diverse languages, cultural values, and digital behaviours present across SEA, making interventions more relevant, trusted and effective.
- Cross-Border: strengthen regional and international cooperation through joint mechanisms and partnerships to combat cross-jurisdictional and transnational scam threats.
Digital safety interventions must be relevant, relatable, and responsive to the everyday realities of users across Southeast Asia. This means designing awareness campaigns in local languages, working through trusted community figures, and building solutions that reflect cultural values and communication styles. Localisation is not an afterthought. It is essential to ensure that efforts reach those who are most vulnerable and resonate with communities at every level. This also goes a long way not only in awareness, but also in adoption of resilience-building techniques.
This report is intended to be a resource and an invitation to dialogue. As scam tactics continually evolve alongside new technologies, whole societies must be prepared to learn and adapt in tandem. This means going beyond effective response and recovery mechanisms, towards integrating efforts across various segments of society, and educating the populace on the most updated scam tactics. It is only by adopting a whole-of-society approach that will allow us as a region to safeguard our digital resilience.
About this report
This report is also a part of SG ScamWISE (Well-Informed, Secured and Empowered), a National Education Programme initiated by Bamboo Builders and supported by Google.org. The Tech for Good Institute is also grateful for the support from Bamboo Builders and Google.org. SG ScamWISE aims to strengthen the resilience of 100,000 Singaporeans, especially underserved youth and seniors, against scams and online threats by 2026.
