On 25 and 26 October 2025, representatives of UN member states, international organizations and civil society will gather in Hanoi for the signing ceremony of the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime, hosted by the government of Vietnam.

The GI-TOC has partnered with the government of Canada, whose generous support has ensured that a side event will be held involving a diverse multistakeholder panel to discuss the key issues and challenges in implementing the new convention effectively.

The ceremony is a milestone in international efforts to address the growing threat of cybercrime, following its adoption by consensus at the UN General Assembly in December 2024. Yet the signing of the convention is only the beginning, and questions remain around its potential added value, and how its human rights and data protection safeguards will be upheld. The new treaty’s impact will depend on how widely it is implemented at the national level, and how governments, civil society, the private sector and academia can collaborate to ensure the Convention is effective and inclusive.

Furthermore, the Convention will be signed amid mounting global levels of cyberscams and related cyber-dependent organized criminal activities. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) will present its latest research on these themes during the conference.

The GI-TOC will also be represented at a high-level roundtable on cyberscams organized by the UK government and Google.

The following is a compendium of GI-TOC analysis on cybercrime and the new convention:

• The cybercrime arms race
• Decoding the message in the Telegram case
• The business of exploitation: The economics of cyber scam operations in Southeast Asia
• Flying under the radar
• Compound crime: Cyber scam operations in Southeast Asia
• The final call: UN member states adopt a new cybercrime treaty
• Russian roulette: Cybercrime treaty risks a world of UN-sanctioned online control
• What’s the protocol on protocols?
• Hitting pause: The unfinished story of the UN Cybercrime negotiations
• UN committee postpones decision on cybercrime convention
• Endgame: The final phase of the UN cybercrime negotiations?