Asian organized crime has become adept at utilizing cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies. They want to widen their product offerings, increase efficiency and profitability, and expand their international footprint. These organizations victimize people from numerous nationalities, bringing in billions of dollars in criminal proceeds. And then they use this money to expand the scope of their criminal operations even more.
The syndicates have moved beyond just drug smuggling, and today they offer money laundering services to other criminal organizations around the globe. They build and run traditional physical scam centers but have run internet gambling scams and, as a service model, provide internet gambling platforms.
They operate unregulated payment processors and cryptocurrency exchanges. They likewise dominate encrypted communications platforms and are developing their own stablecoins, which allow bad actors to more easily move around these digital assets.
These criminal enterprises run underground virtual markets, allowing an anonymous and unregulated trade to flourish between buyers and sellers of illegal commerce and services. Then they broke into the digital space, which multiplied their revenues exponentially. This transition has given TCOs a new leverage— their power on the world stage.
These enormous stores of illegal capital, stored in fiat and cryptocurrencies, are constantly being reinvested into scaling their businesses. This has produced a self-sustaining cycle of serious and non-serious criminal activity that once started, is hard to break.
