Serious and Organised Crime in the Digital Era

Crime is adapting to the digital world

In 2013, just 35.4% of the global population were using the internet. This figure grew to 67.4% by 2023, marking an increase of over 90% in global internet usage over the last 10+ years. [1]

Why is this important?

It’s not just ordinary people and businesses who’ve been part of this change. Criminals are harnessing the internet and other recent technological developments to expand their operations. In fact, they’re often able to do so more rapidly than law enforcement organisations, as they don’t have the same ethical and legal concerns.

From GenAI to messaging platforms with global coverage, new technologies have caused a distinct shift in the face of crime. In this report, we explore how criminals are currently using modern technologies and the digital world to aid them in committing serious and organised crime.

Ease of communication

The internet and the technologies that have accompanied its rise have made it easier to communicate than ever before.

Ever adaptive, criminals are using these technologies to expand the reach and complexity of their operations. There are four main forms of communication to be aware of:

Dedicated encrypted platforms, designed for criminals to use when coordinating illicit activities.

One example of this is Ghost, which was taken down by Europol in 2024. However, criminals remain nimble, building and finding new platforms as their current one becomes compromised.

Dark web (or ‘Darknet’). Although legal to access, the dark web is heavily encrypted and has long been a notorious hub of criminal activity.

Perhaps the most famous dark web marketplace was Silk Road, active from 2011-2013. It was shut down by the FBI, who discovered the true identity of the founder by investigating old forum posts until they found a post where he shared his email, which included his full name.

Legal, privacy-focused, end-to-end encrypted platforms. The benefit of these platforms is that criminals can blend in with legitimate users.

Sometimes these platforms require specialised hardware to access, such as Sky ECC phones. However, plenty are easy to access through most modern smartphones, for example Telegram.

Mainstream social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X.

By using these platforms, criminals can communicate with a large number of legitimate users. This means they’re often used for recruitment.

Crucially, the internet has made it easier for criminals to communicate, meaning that they have a wider reach for and easier access to recruitment, trade and even making financial transactions. The sort of communications that required a high level of technical expertise are now far more accessible to less tech-savvy criminals.

Increased criminal collaboration

One distinct way that digital communication has affected serious and organised crime is by allowing different criminal groups to work together.

In the world of drugs trafficking, Chinese criminal groups are using the internet to supply Mexican cartels with the materials to make fentanyl. Meanwhile, hybrid threat actors are working with organised crime groups globally, blurring the lines between different categories of crime.

Suggested reading: Serious and organised crime isn't the only criminal area being transformed by digital technology. Read our other reports to learn more.

Digital recruitment

Ease of communication has made it simpler for organised crime groups to recruit victims and collaborators. This ranges from selling crime ‘how-to’ guides which encourage others to engage in illicit activities, to pinpointing and grooming future victims. Below, we examine how and where this is happening.

Fraud

Fraud is thriving in the digital age – not just because it’s easier to move money, but also because social media platforms make it easier to recruit victims than ever before.

The advertisement features on these platforms make it straightforward for fraudsters to reach a wide audience and attract victims. For example, fraudsters can place an advert on a huge platform like Facebook, promoting what they claim is a legitimate, safe investment. Once someone clicks and inputs their details, fraudsters can then contact them personally, convincing them of the legitimacy of the scheme and to deposit large sums of money. Here, criminals are exploiting the general public’s use of such platforms. Many people trust these sites, assuming that all adverts are vetted and legitimate. In fact, so many ads are submitted to these sites that illicit actors are able to slip through the cracks.

Cryptocurrency is one of the most popular investment fraud ‘products’ right now. This isn’t just a consequence of digitalisation: it shows how fast criminals are to adapt, too.

Furthermore, fraudsters use the messaging features on these platforms, as well as texting numbers directly. These direct forms of communication mean that criminals are able to form a close relationship with the victim. Then, they exploit this relationship to steal funds – whether through fake investment or by asking for financial aid.

Corruption

Corruption is far from new. It’s long been the accomplice of those looking to commit crime and evade the consequences.

However, the evolving digital landscape has certainly provided new ways to facilitate it.

Criminals are increasingly recruiting corruptees – whether that’s politicians, financial institutions or beyond – online. Digital platforms make it easier for criminals to find a way of contacting these individuals at a distance. Additionally, they potentially lower the risk of detection for both parties, if privacy-focused platforms are used.

Once criminals have recruited a corruptee, new technologies also make it easier for them to transfer the bribe. For example, criminals can exploit the lack of oversight of digital currencies to transfer the funds undetected. Because they’re not using the bank as an intermediary, the usual red flags and alerts won’t be raised. Cash might also provide this benefit, however it must be transferred physically, which carries a risk of detection. Cryptocurrency has no such need and therefore no such risk.

Human Trafficking

For criminals, social media platforms don’t just provide a way to communicate. They also allow for the identification of likely targets.

Plenty of criminals do use a mass communication approach. Digital forms of communication mean they can anonymously contact a huge number of people with minimal expense. The idea is that, eventually, someone will respond.

However, many platforms allow criminals to identify those who are most likely to be susceptible to their schemes. For example, a vulnerable teenager sharing their struggles or a parent looking for work to support their family. Using this information, criminals can tailor their approach.

Fake job offers in particular are a growing trend in human trafficking recruitment. Individuals accept a job abroad and, when they arrive, end up in the hands of criminals who exploit their labour.

Crime-as-a-service

The proliferation of the digital world – both in its capacity to facilitate communication and expand criminal operations – has also led to the growth of crime-as-a-service.

In this model, criminals outsource certain activities, such as money laundering, to individuals with specialised knowledge in that field. This means that criminals can exploit the new opportunities that digitalisation offers, without having to understand how they works. In the case of money laundering, crime-as-a-service even appeals beyond strictly digital techniques. Many more traditional forms of money laundering rely on building complex corporate structures and using proxies to evade detection. Doing this effectively requires specialist knowledge but, due to digital communication platforms, criminals no longer have to possess this knowledge themselves.

Crime-as-a-service also allows criminals to leverage others’ expertise in illicit activities such as:

• Sanctions evasion
• Cyber crime and cyber attacks
• Phishing

A worrying trend, crime-as-a-service enables organised crime networks to expand their operations into different crime areas. This can be purely profit-based, or contribute to existing tactics of corruption, intimidation and recruitment.

Fraud expansion

Fraud is perhaps the crime that has benefitted most from digitalisation. It’s now carried out on a huge scale by large, organised networks and intersects with other crime areas. In 2024, over £1 billion was lost to fraud in the UK – with over 70% of APP fraud originating online.[2]

Scam operations aren’t led by pure opportunists. They’re organised, professional, and constantly adapting to the shifting global landscape. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) recently investigated a scam network which operated much like a legitimate company, providing bonuses for employee performance, outsourcing Marketing and HR, and using an array of modern software to log victim communications. These sorts of fraud operations are facilitated by digital advances and represent a new – and growing – threat in the serious and organised crime space.

Another threat that those countering criminal activity must recognise is the intersection of fraud and human trafficking. In Myanmar, ‘scam compounds’ are growing in number. These compounds don’t include hefty bonuses for the employees, like the operations described above. Instead, individuals take up what they think is a legitimate job offer, only to travel to the new country and find themselves trapped in inhumane conditions, forced to defraud others online. If they don’t comply, the consequences are brutal.

These fraud operations demonstrate just how desperate criminals are to produce profit. They will exploit whatever means they have at their disposal – whether that’s new digital technologies or other human beings – to increase their profits and expand the reach of their crimes.

Profit is the biggest criminal motivator

“They virtually all depend on money laundering to conceal the sources of illegally obtained funds, so that they can re-invest them and further expand their illicit undertakings”[3]

When discussing serious and organised crime and how to disrupt it, it’s important to consider what’s motivating most modern criminals. Although there are those who are ideologically or politically motivated, most criminals conduct illicit activities with the main aim of making money.

However, in order to access the profits of their crimes, criminals must first launder the funds to make them seem legitimate. This makes anti-money laundering a vital component in fighting crime more widely, including serious and organised crime. Disrupting the flow of funds as they enter the legitimate market not only diminishes criminal profits, but it also provides a crucial entry point into unmasking and understanding the networks behind crime.

Traditionally, criminals relied on cash-based methods for ‘cleaning’ money. As new technology has developed, though, so too have new modes of money laundering. Key developments include:

Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that use cryptography. They have grown more popular in recent years, both with legitimate and illicit users. As they operate using Decentralized Finance (DeFi), there is little oversight, which means that criminals can transfer funds within the blockchain without any intermediaries like banks.

However, with the right training and expertise, it’s theoretically possible to trace every step of a cryptocurrency transaction. That’s because much of it is built on blockchain technology, in which each transaction is recorded on an immutable ledger.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

NFTs are unique tokens which denote ownership of a specific item, whether this exists in the real or digital world. Criminals launder them in a variety of ways, including overpaying for an NFT to transfer money or creating NFTs to trade to accomplices. Essentially, criminals can exploit NFTs to mimic legitimate transactions and, doing so, move huge amounts of money.

As with cryptocurrency, criminals are exploiting the lack of oversight and understanding of NFTs.

Regardless of the method criminals are using to launder their money, a common final step is to move the money into a traditional bank account so that it can be easily accessed. In other cases, they may use it to buy assets such as real estate or luxury goods to ‘clean’ it. It’s crucial that the organisations facilitating these accounts and transactions have stringent measures in place to identify and prevent money laundering, and that public sector bodies can collaborate with them to identify, investigate and prosecute individuals laundering money.

Changing global circumstances

It’s likely that the combination of ongoing global hardship and straightforward access to technologies that facilitate crime have driven more people to use illicit activities as a source of profit. In this way, we might say that crime is even more profit-motivated than before – and modern digital developments are partly to blame.

Emerging techniques for countering serious and organised crime

So far, we’ve discussed how organised crime networks are using the modern digital landscape to expand operations.

What insights does this give us into how to disrupt these emerging illicit activities effectively?

Collaboration

Digitalisation is enabling criminals to operate on a truly global scale. Those fighting them must be capable of tackling this problem as a whole, not just the parts of it that occur within a particular area. This means effective collaboration across borders and between organisations.

Additionally, we’ve already discussed why effective counter-economic crime measures are a crucial part of fighting organised crime. Public sector organisations might be responsible for enforcing money laundering laws and prosecuting criminals, but private sector companies like banks play a significant role in facilitating money laundering. This means they also need to be involved in any effective solution – making cross-sector collaboration key.

Leveraging digital technology

Digital technologies offer easier, clearer communication across a greater distance than ever before. While there may be legal and logistical barriers in place when it comes to cross-border and cross-sector collaboration, we can’t ignore the potential benefits of leveraging digital advances here.

Facilitating collaboration isn’t the only place where increased knowledge and use of digitalisation can contribute to fighting organised crime. Since criminals are adapting to digitalisation, it follows that law enforcement must too. For example, when it comes to money laundering, many cryptocurrency transactions are traceable – investigators must simply have the right knowledge and skills to do so. Here, understanding digitalisation can have a huge impact on our ability to combat this new type of money laundering.

The importance of OSINT

Better training can have a huge impact when it comes to leveraging other aspects of the digital world, too.

Criminals are increasingly using the internet to recruit, communicate, trade and transact. Investigators must be prepared to leverage publicly available internet data to track this criminal activity and map out connections.

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) refers to the targeted collection and analysis of publicly available data, often internet data. It can be drawn from sources including:

• News media
• Corporate records
• Publicly available social media
• Online forums
• Search engines
• Deep and dark web content

It’s easy to see why OSINT is becoming an essential resource as more criminals turn to the internet. Historically a niche discipline, OSINT has nevertheless been used for years by many public sector investigators. As OSINT becomes increasingly digital and offers the potential for more direct insights into criminal activity, it needs to be widely understood and implemented by more investigators working to counter serious and organised crime.

Adopting new technologies

Alongside exploring new techniques to counter digital crime, it’s important to consider adopting new technologies.

Naturally, those countering serious and organised crime have more barriers to implementing new technology than criminals do. Criminals don’t have to worry about ethical implications or reliability: they can simply try something out and, if it doesn’t work, move on.

This difference gives us important insights into how counter-organised crime teams should approach using new technology. Having more ethical and legal boundaries in place can be seen as an advantage, as it encourages considered, strategic use of technology. These teams shouldn’t use new tools just for the sake of doing so. Instead, they should invest in meaningful innovation and deploy new tools where they will have maximum impact.

Artificial intelligence

AI has risen in popularity rapidly in recent years. Criminals are certainly no strangers to it, whether that’s fraudsters using GenAI to create convincing scripts or cyber threat actors leveraging deepfakes to infiltrate organisations.

But is it possible to use AI to counter criminals without sacrificing safety, integrity or ethics? Can AI achieve anything that investment in the right training can’t?

In order to understand where AI could fit within criminal investigations, we must first understand AI’s strengths and limitations. On the one hand, AI can ingest far more data than a human can, and at a much more rapid pace. It can also be designed to follow set logical steps. What it can’t do is think and make decisions like a human: AI chatbots might output human language, but that doesn’t mean a human mind is behind it. Understanding this allows us to then focus AI usage on the tasks it will be best at, for example:

• Sorting through large amounts of data
• Presenting large datasets in a more digestible format, e.g. by categorising them
• Highlighting potentially relevant information, so that the investigator knows where to focus
• Pinpointing hard to spot insights, such as connections between two individuals

Ultimately, the best use of AI will vary depending on what data an investigator is working with, the time they have available to them and the aim of the investigation. But there are some ways to identify a more reliable tool, regardless of use case. These are:

• Full explainability. Good AI tools will allow you to see each step they took and where they got their information.
• Deferring to the human investigator. AI isn’t capable of making the nuanced, complex decisions that humans can. This means you shouldn’t trust tools that claim to produce a reliable conclusion with just the click of a button. Instead, a tool might automate parts of the investigation and leave the final steps, at least, for human review.

By avoiding these pitfalls, AI can increase efficiency and reduce human error.

Automating OSINT

Earlier, we discussed how important OSINT is for fighting serious and organised crime in an increasingly digitalised world.

The problem, though, is that OSINT is traditionally a highly manual technique. This becomes challenging when teams – which are already stretched thin – must counter increasingly complex criminal operations. Relying on manual techniques, there’s often not enough time to gain a real understanding of criminal activity before more damage gets done.

Luckily, modern OSINT platforms cut out much of the tedious manual workload, allowing investigators to derive deeper insights, faster. Such platforms assist investigators in cutting through the growing amount of digital noise, even as criminal activity grows more complex.

Here are some of the key features to look for in a good OSINT tool:

• Anonymity and safety: It’s important to avoid accidental tip-offs when investigating. Good OSINT platforms help investigators to remain anonymous, protecting both the integrity of the investigation and the safety of the practitioner. Of course, such masking can be done manually, but it requires a high level of technical knowledge and takes up valuable time.
• Data agnostic: One of the benefits of OSINT is the wide variety of sources it encompasses. However, such sources are disparate and, when research is conducted manually, it can take time to switch between them. Software that enables you to access all the sources you need in one place significantly improves the ease and efficiency of investigation.
• Network visualisation: Serious and organised crime relies on complex networks of individuals, businesses and more. OSINT data is often inherently network-based, making it ideal for mapping out these links. However, it can be hard to understand connections if they’re not displayed in an intuitive way. Good OSINT solutions do this automatically.
• Automation and AI: Innovative OSINT platforms offer strategic automation and AI features. These features slot naturally into common workflows and automate the tedious, manual parts of an investigation, streamlining the process and supporting, not replacing, the investigator.

Want to learn more about how we’re helping teams adapt to new criminal behaviours?

We’re Blackdot Solutions, leading providers of investigations technology in the criminal investigations space. Book a call with one of our experts today to understand how you can adapt to the changing digital landscape and continue to fight some of the most serious crimes happening today.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-individuals-using-the-internet

[2] https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/news-and-insight/press-release/fraud-report-2025-press-release

[3] https://www.europol.europa.eu/publication-events/main-reports/changing-dna-of-serious-and-organised-crime