UN: Crime Groups in Southeast Asia Find Success on Telegram

Powerful crime groups in Southeast Asia use the messaging app Telegram widely, the United Nations said in a report on Monday. It said the app's use led to major changes in the way such groups carry out large criminal operations.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) produced the report. The investigators say stolen data, including credit card information, passwords and browser history, are openly traded on the app. The app has many channels and little content supervision, the report said.

Criminals on the app also sell tools used for cybercrime, including so-called deepfake software and data-stealing malware. And, criminal cryptocurrency exchanges carry out business on Telegram also, the report said.

"We move 3 million USDT stolen from overseas per day," the report quoted one advertisement as saying in Chinese.

There is "strong evidence of underground data markets moving to Telegram and vendors actively looking to target transnational organized crime groups based in Southeast Asia," the report said.

Southeast Asia has emerged as a center for a multibillion-dollar online crime industry that targets victims across the world. Many industry members are Chinese criminal groups that operate from large, protected complexes using trafficked workers. The industry makes between $27.4 billion to $36.5 billion yearly, the UNODC said.

In August, French police arrested Telegram's leader Pavel Durov in Paris. Officials charged him with permitting criminal activity on the site, including the online spread of sexual images of children.

Telegram, which has close to 1 billion users, did not immediately answer a request for comment

Following his arrest, Durov said the app would surrender users' IP addresses and phone numbers to French officials making legal requests. He also said the app would remove some tools that have been abused for illegal activity.

The report said the huge amount of profit earned by criminal groups in the area led them to change their operating methods. They established new business models and added technologies to their systems, including malware, generative artificial intelligence and deepfakes, officials say.

The UNODC said it had identified more than ten deepfake software service providers “targeting criminal groups involved in cyber-enabled fraud in Southeast Asia."

I'm Caty Weaver.

Reuters reported this story. Caty Weaver adapted it for VOA Learning English.

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browser - n. a computer program used for accessing sites or information on a network (such as the World Wide Web)

deepfake - n. an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said

malware - n. software designed to interfere with a computer's normal functioning

cryptocurrency - n. any form of currency that only exists digitally, that usually uses a decentralized system for issuing new units and reording transactions, and that relies on cryptography to prevent fraudulent transactions

vendor - n. seller

fraud - n. the use of dishonest methods to cheat another person of something valuable