Southeast Asian leaders, with US and Chinese counterparts, will renew alarm over online scams

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Southeast Asian leaders and their key counterparts, including from the United States and China, will renew their alarm over the escalating threat of online scams, according to a draft statement seen by The Associated Press on Friday.Such transnational crimes, which have swindled billions of dollars from people in Asia to the United States and elsewhere, will be high in the agenda when leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations gather in an annual summit with their Asian and Western counterparts on Tuesday in the Philippine capital.The Philippines currently holds the rotating leadership of ASEAN, an 11-nation bloc in a poverty-stricken region where criminal groups have used technology and resorted to human trafficking to expand their illicit and lucrative operations to other parts of the world.The leaders of the expanded ASEAN bloc, called the East Asia Summit, will express their “grave concern over the escalating threat posed by transnational crimi