Technological advances are enabling financial crime across Asia, making fraud faster, more scalable, and more convincing in nature.

Companies accordingly face growing threats from false payment requests, abuse of executive identities, forged documents, and the theft of confidential data.

Moreover, the sophistication of such fraud is intensifying, meaning that directors and management need to act early to identify and close off vulnerabilities, so as to protect critical company interests.

SVA has extensive experience in handling complex, cross-border investigations into financial crime, and in advising boards and management on fraud prevention, incident response, asset tracing, and recovery options.

North Korean “laptop farming”

A striking case emerged in 2025 when the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) arrested individuals who had sold American citizens’ identification details to government-linked organisations in North Korea – ultimately securing convictions in 2026 on wire fraud and other charges.

Those cases revealed how fraudsters in North Korea had used both stolen and fake IDs to win remote IT work from US companies, thereby securing US dollars for use by Pyongyang in contravention of financial sanctions.

The North Korean entities ran “laptop farms” that used AI assistants to provide code to the US companies, and which allowed their “workers” to hold multiple roles. The scammers earned millions from US-based companies – in one case, payments were in the order of USD5 million.

The cases were striking in terms of their sophistication. Subsequent assessments showed that entirely fake IDs had passed due diligence and reference checks. The frauds also relied on AI-generated synthetic identities, use of Voice over Internet Protocol phone numbers, the creation of false portfolio websites, deepfake video imaging, and VPNs to hide locations.

Technology-enabled frauds

The North Korean fraud is obviously eye-catching, but smaller cases also illustrate how technology-enabled fraud is changing the landscape of financial crime in Asia.

• In Singapore, the impersonation of government officials, such as representatives of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, on video calls has resulted in losses – of SGD4.9 million in a single case in May 2026.
• In Hong Kong, cryptocurrency and investment scams in the first half of 2026 have made increased use of AI-generated images and videos to target investors, adding to a longstanding problem.
• In Australia, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (“ASIC”) warned in August 2026 of fake videos of ministers, used to promote fraudulent investment schemes.

These cases encompass a variety of frauds and jurisdictions, but nonetheless speak to how technology is boosting fraud.

Statistics also point to this shift. Reported cases of fraud amounted to 48.5% of all recorded crime in Hong Kong in 2025, while detailed analysis of those figures showed a shift away from lower value scams towards more damaging, higher value crimes.

The quantum of loss in the most damaging categories is also rising sharply, with losses to online investment frauds up by 58.4%.

Technology as a facilitator

Of note is that technology is aiding criminals in scaling up activities, through the use of digital platforms, cloned webpages that mimic legitimate company sites, and mass communications infrastructure.

In June 2025, the Hong Kong and Singapore police forces arrested four people in each city, for instance, who had made use of perhaps as many as 400,000 Hong Kong SIM cards to generate mass scam calls.

The subversion of identification and other controls has also become easier, particularly where companies rely on a static due diligence process. AI can now generate extremely high-quality forgeries that readily subvert customer due diligence and identification processes. AI-generated documents can show apparent signs of wear and tear, or even reflections as in photographs.

AI-assisted analysis can also assist fraudsters in identifying key personnel or vulnerabilities within companies, and in tailoring messaging for phishing or comparable email compromise attempts. AI thus makes posing as a staff member, third-party adviser, or customer much less of a challenge.

The online risk

AI is also magnifying the threat from cybercrime, in large part by helping with targeting; recent figures in Hong Kong revealed a rise in cybercrimes aimed at higher-value victims. AI-enabled hacking has also made business email compromise, the manipulation of payment processes, and account takeover and ransomware scams available to many more people.

Fraudsters are also drawing on other cutting edge financial technologies, such as rapid payment systems and digital assets – just as do legitimate businesses. Cryptocurrencies, in particular, facilitate the movement of illicit funds across borders, and aid in laundering funds.

Digital assets pose additional challenges to those seeking restitution. Even in instances where cryptocurrencies are traceable (such as when the funds pass through custodial wallets), their movement across a host of jurisdictions can make pursuit costly, slow, and, in some cases, uneconomical.

Who is at risk?

All companies are at increasing risk – but board members and senior management should take particular care, not least as their identity, authority and access are of immense value to fraudsters seeking to exploit weaknesses.

Businesses operating in financial centres are especially exposed, given those jurisdictions’ importance as regional financial centres, their widespread adoption of financial technology, and their clusters of professional service providers.

A geopolitical wrinkle

An added problem is that geopolitical unease is complicating response and recovery efforts.

Law enforcement agencies and victims seeking restitution have long struggled to overcome jurisdictional, legal and practical obstacles. Now, though, geopolitical tensions, and an associated slippage in agency cooperation, have made cross-jurisdictional investigations more complex, slower, and sometimes quite fraught.

That trend has made intelligence-led efforts to identify the beneficiaries of fraud, as well as their proxies and associated corporate or trust structures, more important than ever before.

What to do?

Boards and senior management should act now. The risk of large-scale losses, regulatory scrutiny, and reputational damage is growing, even as technological advances are eroding the effectiveness of controls that were developed to deal with less sophisticated threats.

Executives should start by establishing clear governance mechanisms, perhaps by coordinating the work of relevant divisions, such as IT, legal, compliance and communications. Treating cyber-protection and financial crime and compliance as separate functions could create blind spots, for instance, or slow a necessary response.

Management should also strengthen prevention, by ensuring that staff are appropriately trained, and by adhering to robust due diligence standards, by tightening controls over staff approvals, by adopting layered ID verification or payment authorisation checks, and by introducing new procedures for video calls.

Executives should also improve detection by enhancing transaction monitoring, documenting approval processes, creating reliable audit trails, and establishing intelligence-led mechanisms to tackle financial crime, akin to those that handle regulatory, sanctions and money laundering risks. Periodic audit alone will not protect companies from this new generation of frauds.

Senior executives should also respond promptly to red flags, and act fast to staunch losses, to conduct detailed investigations, to notify relevant stakeholders, and to gather documentation for evidential purposes.

Finally, boards should launch external asset search and tracing measures, and recovery actions, without delay, or risk the stolen funds vanishing into the ether.

SVA

SVA has a great deal of experience in supporting clients in handling incidents of fraud and financial crime, through investigations, enhanced due diligence, intelligence gathering, the tracing and recovering of assets, and providing of advice and support in the recovery process.

If we can be of any assistance to your organisation in dealing with these complicated issues, please do not hesitate to contact us at the numbers below or visit our website at www.stevevickersassociates.com .