Greater than half of the crimes registered within the metropolis of Tashkent in 2025 have been cybercrimes, based on the Tashkent Metropolis Prosecutor’s Workplace. With the enlargement of digital companies and monetary transactions carried out on-line, criminals are following the cash.
The Uzbek authorities is aware of this can be a drawback, however its lacking the only answer: digital literacy.
Final 12 months, Uzbekistan’s Inside Ministry’s Cybercrime Middle advised Gazeta.uz that theft and fraud involving financial institution playing cards are the commonest crimes, together with phishing and quite a lot of intelligent scams that persuade people to give up their banking particulars to criminals.
Uzbekistan’s inhabitants is younger – with some 60 p.c of the inhabitants underneath the age of 30 – and youth are presumed to be technologically adept. However given the skyrocketing charges of cybercrimes, it’s clear that digital literacy is lagging behind the menace.
Digital literacy abilities are essential in combatting cybercrimes. Within the context of Indonesia, a gaggle of students concluded that “low digital literacy contributes to the rising vulnerability of people and organizations to cyber assaults.” These assaults embrace net defacement, stealer malware and ransomware, AI-based cyber threats, phishing, and extra.
“Digital safety is just not solely the duty of the federal government,” the students wrote, “however the public should additionally participate in defending their knowledge by being well-literate.”
Digital literacy is the power to responsibly discover, consider, make the most of, share, and create content material on-line; it shares apparent attributes with different types of literacy, reminiscent of media literacy, particularly with regards to evaluating on-line info like a submit on social media promoting a well-paying job overseas.
One survey-based examine of youth and digital know-how in Central Asia, which examined how youth use digital know-how, made a transparent hyperlink between media and digital literacy.
“Media and digital literacy — the capability to find, confirm, and thoughtfully interact with on-line content material — has turn out to be important in an period marked by misinformation, algorithm-driven echo chambers, and knowledge overload,” Farrukh Irnazarov wrote in a paper revealed final August by the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute Silk Street Research Program. Irnazarov recognized a niche between acknowledged values and precise behaviors, noting “youth overwhelmingly specific a dedication to accuracy and factchecking, but their precise behaviors typically fall wanting these beliefs.”
And this has implications for cybersecurity: “Cybersecurity consciousness stays low: private knowledge, together with financial institution particulars, is commonly shared freely each on-line and offline.”
In an period outlined by the moment gratification of infinite scrolling on platforms like TikTok, and suffused with get-rich-quick schemes and intelligent techniques to get round rules and get forward, it’s of little shock that checking the information – a brake on taking motion – is without doubt one of the first habits to go.
And Uzbekistan’s crime statistics lay out the results.
Earlier this month Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev was briefed on proposals to struggle cybercrime. Within the readout, the Uzbek authorities acknowledged that since 2020, there was a 48-fold improve in experiences of cybercrimes. In 2025, the readout famous, “82 p.c of fraud instances and 76 p.c of thefts have been dedicated in our on-line world.” The fabric harm to people and firms exceeded 2 trillion Uzbek soms ($163.8 million).
The primary proposal? Growing residents’ private duty. “It has been proposed to determine administrative and legal legal responsibility for permitting digital cost devices, crypto-wallets, SIM playing cards, and digital accounts registered of their names for use within the fee of cybercrimes.”
In brief: Punish the one that fell for the rip-off.
Different proposals included introducing fines for corporations that don’t adjust to info and cybersecurity necessities, and authorized liabilities for banks offering distant monetary companies for cybercrimes that consequence from non-compliance with established digital rules.
Not one of the proposals talked about touches on digital literacy.
Uzbekistan’s flagship digital technique – Digital Uzbekistan 2030 – goals to develop the digital financial system, and introduce fashionable info and communications applied sciences in all sectors. The related presidential decree mentions digital literacy as soon as, within the context of creating greater training establishments to enhance digital literacy within the areas and prepare authorities staff. This barely scratches the floor because the alternatives for cybercrime explode.
Cybercrime and the results of low digital literacy are usually not issues distinctive to Uzbekistan. This week, 24.kg in neighboring Kyrgyzstan reported that on-line scammers promoting jobs with massive salaries in the UK and Germany managed to steal $110,000 from 68 folks in 2025. Final month, Kazakh authorities detained 20 suspects in Turkestan associated to an web and phone fraud scheme they declare induced 125 million tenge ($258,900) in damages to 21 victims.
And these are usually not issues distinctive to Central Asia: Southeast Asia has earned the unlucky moniker of the “rip-off capital of the world” on the again of huge on-line scams operated out of services in international locations like Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos. These rip-off facilities are sometimes staffed by individuals who themselves had fallen sufferer to on-line scams (together with some from Central Asia), and have been trafficked to the area to work in prison-like situations. The dimensions of the harm is immense. In 2024, Individuals misplaced over $10 billion because of Southeast Asia-based scams, based on the U.S. authorities.
There are not any straightforward options, however an apparent first step is to empower people to suppose critically about what they learn on-line.
