The warning matters because the criminal enterprise behind it now generates more money each year than most national economies, according to new UN crime data, even as the people forced to run the scams are still routinely arrested as criminals rather than treated as trafficking victims.

Amy Pope, director-general of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), issued the alert Tuesday in Geneva. She said recruiters specifically target people who speak good English and often hold university degrees, advertising what look like ordinary jobs on social media.

Those jobs are the trap. Once victims arrive, Pope said, they are locked inside compounds, stripped of their passports and phones, and placed under constant watch. Many are beaten or threatened. They are forced, through violence and debt bondage, into running scam operations aimed at victims around the world.

"They're often subjected to physical or mental abuse," Pope said. "They are often unable to leave."

A red flag: the wrong visa

IOM flagged one specific, checkable warning sign. Victims are frequently brought in on tourist visas rather than work permits, a mismatch the agency says every applicant should question before leaving home. It is a small detail, but a concrete one: a stamp in a passport that doesn't match the job being offered.

Pope was direct about what she considers the industry's most dangerous myth. "What often presents as something that looks like an ideal job opportunity is just too good to be true," she said.

The agency's core demand is a legal reclassification. IOM says people forced to run scams from inside these compounds are trafficking victims, not criminals, and should be protected rather than prosecuted. "We're seeing many of the survivors of trafficking actually being identified as criminals, but in reality, they are the victims of this crime," Pope said.

Related News

That distinction has practical consequences. Survivors who are prosecuted instead of recognized as trafficking victims face criminal records on top of the abuse they already survived, according to IOM's framing of the problem.

The numbers behind the alert

IOM says it assisted more than 3,500 victims of forced criminality in South-East Asia between 2022 and 2025. Those victims came from 39 countries. The largest numbers came from Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Kenya and Bangladesh, IOM said.

The scam centres themselves are based in Asia. But the recruitment is not confined there. IOM said traffickers recruit globally through social media, which is how the victim pool has grown to include people from more than 80 countries, per Pope's Geneva remarks.

Recovery does not end when someone escapes a compound. IOM said survivors often return home facing trauma, stigma, unresolved debt, missing identity documents and fear of prosecution in their own countries. Rescue, in the agency's own description, is only the start of recovery.

A criminal economy larger than the response to it

The financial scale of the industry is where the story turns from a migration issue into a global economic one. New data from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) puts 2025 losses from scam offences across East and South-East Asia, Australia and New Zealand at between $88.3 billion and $114.1 billion.

That range, as UNODC presented it, dwarfs the resources currently devoted to fighting trafficking. Pope's own warning was blunt on this point: unless the issue is taken seriously, she said, it will continue to grow.

IOM's response, for now, is a policy ask rather than an operational one. The agency is calling for greater investment in victim protection, safe return and reintegration programs, and wider public awareness campaigns about traffickers' tactics.

What IOM has not specified is how much funding it is requesting, from which governments, or on what timeline. Nor has it named which countries currently prosecute trafficking survivors as criminals, a practice Pope described as ongoing but did not attach to specific jurisdictions. UNODC's country-by-country breakdown of the $88.3 billion to $114.1 billion loss estimate, and which governments plan to act on it, remains the next document to watch.