Modern-day criminal networks have abandoned rigid hierarchies to adopt a cross-border “crime-as-a-service” business model.
Criminal networks have always been quick to adapt. Century after century, they have seized on every new technology, every economic shift, every political structures. This remains all too true today.
Crime in the Cloud
According to Žaneta Navickienė, a professor at Mykolas Romeris University and chair of the board at the Criminalists Association of Lithuania, modern-day organised-crime networks are exploiting globalisation and its interconnected economies – including the European Union and its Schengen Area.
“Both researchers and practitioners tend to describe contemporary criminal activities as borderless and limitless. What does this mean? First and foremost, it refers to the global nature and international scale inherent in these criminal acts. It is no longer the case that a crime is committed entirely within a single state. Instead, it often spans several – sometimes more than a dozen – countries. A crime might begin in one state and end in another.”
You can listen to the original clip in Lithuanian here.
This is, of course, largely due to the technological revolution of our time, digitisation, as Žaneta Navickiene explains.
“Modern criminal activity has shifted into the digital realm. While it would be incorrect to claim that traditional crimes have vanished or ceased to occur, a vast proportion of criminal activity now takes place online. Perpetrators employ a wide variety of new methods and forms – such as fraud and financial scams, where various platforms are used in an attempt to obtain, for example, bank login details. Techniques include phishing, text messages and fraudulent phone calls.”
You can listen to the original clip in Lithuanian here.
Through so-called ‘deepfakes’ and other similar techniques, artificial intelligence is making fraud increasingly insidious and dangerous.
At the top of their game?
These developments also directly impact how criminal networks are organised. Rather than retaining their traditional hierarchical structure, these networks are increasingly taking the form of a ‘network of networks’, made up of autonomous cells. This means they operate in a fragmented manner, with each cell possessing specialist expertise that is used across the entire criminal activity chain.
Such structures can be agile and fluid, and sometimes even temporary, meaning that they are formed for a specific operation and then disbanded.
Fernando Miró Llinares, a Spanish professor of criminal law and an expert in crime and new technologies, describes this web-like structure as the ‘platformisation’ of organised crime.
“This includes, for example, a scenario where we – as a criminal platform – want to carry out a specific activity but lack the necessary hacking skills and need someone to do this for us, or require a set of data, or want credit card numbers, etc. We can purchase those services, but we can also offer our own services as an organised criminal group to carry out even more serious criminal activities, such as contract killings, in return.”
You can listen to the original clip in Spanish here.
Furthermore, recruitment platforms exist that make it particularly easy to outsource jobs and skills, as well as the inherent risks. Criminal networks have access, for instance, to an increasing number of young people willing to carry out dangerous operations.
Organisations including Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, have identified several dozen very young ‘shooters’, often aged between 12 and 15, who have been recruited online to carry out punitive operations. There is the much-publicised case of Pépito, for example – the 14-year-old French boy who killed an innocent man and was subsequently turned in by the mafia that had hired him.
So, how do children of this age find themselves caught up in this world? Mafia groups often target young people from vulnerable and disadvantaged backgrounds, like Pépito… but that is not the whole story, according to Constantin Crăiţoiu, a lecturer in sociology at Romania’s University of Craiova.
“It is not just about money, although that aspect is essential. It is also about social status, a sense of belonging, a certain legitimacy, a sense of importance. A great many people, a great many so-called gangsters, and even women involved in certain organised crime networks – we are talking about prostitution and other such activities in the adult industry here – have social media accounts. They communicate and they livestream, enjoying the attention and approval of an ever-widening audience.”
You can listen to the original clip in Romanian here.
The mafia also exploits social media in more extreme ways to draw people in, adds Spanish professor Miró Llinares – including through the ‘gamification’ of its activities.
“This is sometimes even done in a ‘gamified’ way – like in a game where you earn a reward, where you’re part of a group, and so on. And yes, of course this makes it easier for criminal organisations to network with one another, to subcontract work in territories they don’t control, to seek out specific services, etc.”
You can listen to the original clip in Spanish here.
A many-headed beast
The sheer number, flexibility and fragmentation of these organisations makes the task facing the judicial authorities and law enforcement agencies more difficult. Not only are criminal networks harder to trace, but even when a cell is dismantled, the rest of the organisation continues to exist.
Three-quarters of the 821 most threatening criminal networks identified in 2024 no longer appear on that list two years later, says Europol. But 533 new ones have emerged in the meantime…
Romanian expert Constantin Crăiţoiu provides further details.
“The police have lost something very important: a central target. If we think of a classic organisation, you had the leader, the lieutenants, the foot soldiers – and if you decapitated that organisation, it stopped functioning, like in a war. But the modern model is very different. The network operates more like a criminal franchise. One group supplies the drugs, another the transport, another the money laundering, another handles the digital side of things. Sometimes they do not even know one another. And the internet has greatly helped both the concealment of these organisations and the cooperation between them. What holds them together is not necessarily loyalty to a boss, but economic interests. There has been a shift from the criminal clan to the criminal ecosystem.”
You can listen to the original clip in Romanian here.
Longstanding criminal organisations with a strong physical presence, such as the ’Ndrangheta in Italy or the Albanian mafia, may sometimes act as figureheads, trading on their reputation to secure favours.
Ago Leis heads up the Organised Crime Bureau at Estonia’s Central Criminal Police; he explains that criminal groups seek support from well-established criminal bodies with influence, be they at home or abroad. He provides evidence to support this claim.
“Everyone has contacts – a fact that became very clear from the analysis of data from platforms such as Anom, Sky ECC and other encrypted communication platforms. These conversations revealed that if someone needed to bring, say, a hundred kilos of drugs in from South America, the necessary logistics – a port and all the other essential links – could be arranged for them. You don’t need to set up the entire operation yourself from scratch in Estonia – that would be more expensive as you’d have to pay everyone involved. With today’s communication tools, virtually all these services can be found within the network.”
You can listen to the original clip in Estonian here.
Europol notes that the most threatening criminal networks comprise more than 400,000 members representing 118 nationalities.
International networking
Meanwhile, all of them network extensively, seeking to forge relationships at all levels, confirms Dr Mario Matteucci, a criminologist working for the Italian interior ministry.
“There is no competition between our mafia syndicates and similar structures abroad because that simply doesn’t pay. Instead, they draw on something very important: their credibility in terms of reliability and solvency. This means that if [an Italian] mafioso – a ’Ndrangheta member, say – goes to South America to negotiate a specific transaction such as a drug shipment or to commit a crime because there is something to be gained from it, he does so credibly. In other words, he is welcomed by the other side, invited to take a seat, listened to, and very often helped to commit the crime, all on the basis of this credibility. So, if our criminal goes to Russia, Albania or Nigeria, rather than contesting the physical, social or economic space of [the foreign] structure, he uses it as part of a reciprocal relationship.”
You can listen to the original clip in Italian here.
George Papaprodromou, the former director of the Cybercrime Prosecution Directorate of the Hellenic Police, sums up the situation well :
“Essentially, we are dealing with hybrid models that combine elements of traditional hierarchical structures with more modern forms of task allocation. A characteristic example is the ‘crime as a service’ model, which effectively involves a form of outsourcing – delegating specific tasks to other criminal networks or to other groups operating within this field.”
You can listen to the original clip in Greek here.
And these networks are managed as professionally as any multinational organisation, notes Lithuanian expert Navickienė.
“Modern criminal activities are characterised by a high level of professionalism and sophisticated preparation. When examining criminal groups and considering reports and data from international law enforcement agencies in recent years, it becomes evident that the crimes uncovered or cases brought to court involved extensive planning. Meticulously, over the course of several years.”
You can listen to the original clip in Lithuanian here.
The same can be said for all forms of serious and organised crime, with Europol noting that these are “progressively destabilising, increasingly nurtured online, and strongly accelerated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other new technologies.”
These days, the way the criminal world works isn’t about loyalty to a crime boss: it’s all about cold economic efficiency.
In order for Europe to counteract the destabilising effect of these artificial intelligence-fuelled networks, dismantling isolated cells is no longer enough: it their business model and digital channels, as well as the systemic vulnerabilities from which they profit.
- Hermine Donceel, Euranet Plus News Agency
