The Global Fraud Landscape
Fraud is a booming industry, with scammers pulling in over $1 trillion from their victims in 2024. Businesses are paying the price: 87% of businesses reported an increase in online fraud, with most experiencing a 1% to 9% loss in revenue as a result. In terms of individual consumers, Asia reported digital scam losses reaching $700 billion last year, compared to the $12.5 billion reported by US consumers in 2024.
Trust-based financial exploitation scams are especially lucrative. Examples include romance scams, investment scams, or impersonation scams. Fraudulent actors can adapt impersonation scams to target businesses, such as by posing as regulators or impersonating executives. The percentage of people who reported losing money to fraud and scams increased from 27% in 2023 to 38% in 2024, suggesting that scams are increasingly more effective and believable.
Huione Marketplace: The One-Stop Shop for Fraud
Online platforms that market tools and services to Chinese-speaking cybercriminals are one factor behind this boom, making it easier for criminals to execute fraud at scale. Huione Guarantee, a prominent gray-market hub that operates under the Huione Group, a Cambodian financial conglomerate, acts as a one-stop shop for fraud-related tools and services. The website compiles Telegram channels with posts offering cryptocurrency mining tools, money laundering, and malware-as-a-service. The channels also promote offerings that use social engineering to facilitate fraud, including the sale of social media accounts to adopt realistic online personas, as well as personal, financial, and employment data to personalize the scam. Sellers also advertise generative AI deepfake voice and face-changing tools, some of which list US-sanctioned computer hardware components in the technology specifications. Advanced consumer-grade GPUs, like the kind recommended by threat actors for an advanced face swapping tool sold on the Huione Marketplace, are widely available through underground and informal distribution networks.
Transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) use services from Huione Guarantee to support large-scale scam operations. These organizations operate call center compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar that force human trafficking victims to carry out hundreds of scam calls each day. Coerced labor is augmented with generative AI tools, including deepfake impersonations and automated bots. Chinese and Thai law enforcement have made joint efforts to shut down the call centers by repatriating trafficking victims and shutting down power to the regions where they operate. However, political instability and weak governance in regions where these centers operate make sustained enforcement efforts challenging.
Huione infrastructure also supports money laundering services through Huoine Pay, the conglomerate’s banking arm. The Huione Pay website advertises money laundering services along with other scam tools. The National Bank of Cambodia recently stripped Huoine Pay’s banking license in response to international pressure, though further enforcement actions such as arrests or fines have not yet been made.
Huione infrastructure (Huione Guarantee and Huione Pay) help to expand scam operations conducted by Chinese criminals (Source: Recorded Future)
New Markets: Expanding to the US and Beyond
TCOs are beginning to look to other regions to grow their operations. Scam losses per capita in the US are the highest in the world at $3,520, offering an enticing market for expanding operations. The majority of scams these groups operate appear to target individuals, employing a variety of scam techniques based on who they are targeting and which scams are working.
Businesses can protect themselves from scam-related revenue losses by adapting their employee training and policies to keep up with increasingly sophisticated scams.
- Update phishing detection training to include more sophisticated tactics, such as more professional-sounding content in emails or even deepfake voice or video calls, to help employees recognize fraudulent communications.
- Discourage using unmonitored personal devices for sensitive business functions to ensure that the security team can quickly identify malware infection, data exfiltration, or suspicious network activity due to fraud.
- Ensure employees and leadership alike have a trusted mechanism for reporting suspicious activity. In addition, providing assurances that scam victims will not be punished can help ensure they report the scams to the security team, which may then be able to intervene before more serious losses are incurred.
Recorded Future customers can access the full report with deeper technical detail titled, “Huione Guarantee Serves as a One Stop Shop for Chinese Speaking Cybercriminals” in the platform.