eu-europol-org-crime-report

KEY TRENDS
FOR THE FUTURE OF SERIOUS AND
ORGANISED CRIME
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8
A decline of traditional hierarchical criminal
groups and networks will be accompanied
by the expansion of a virtual criminal underground
made up of individual criminal
entrepreneurs, which come together on a
project-basis and lend their knowledge, experience
and expertise as part of a crime-as-aservice
business model. This criminal market
dynamic is already realised in the realm of
cybercrime, but in the future will also extend
to the domain of 'traditional' organised crime
and govern crime areas such as drugs trafficking,
the facilitation of illegal immigration
or the counterfeiting of goods. In this fragmented
and global criminal market criminal
actors will engage in ‘co-opetition’, which
sees competing actors interact or cooperate in
the ad hoc pursuit of criminal opportunities.
Less reliant on established criminal groups
and hierarchies which can be more easily
targeted by law enforcement, criminals will
simultaneously diversify their activities and
specialise in the expertise they offer. Criminal
actors, both groups and increasingly individual
criminal entrepreneurs, will adopt the crimeas-a-service
business model, which is facilitated
by social networking online with its ability
to provide a relatively secure environment to
easily and anonymously communicate. In the
pursuit of new clients, organised crime will
invariably seek to change the commodities
they trade shifting from traditional goods to
new commodities.
Almost all types of organised crime activities
will rely on digital infrastructures. The trade
in illicit goods and the exchange of money
will take place in the virtual realm requiring
little face-to-face interaction between trading
partners and reducing risks of discovery
and interception. Virtual currencies will
allow organised criminals to anonymously
exchange and use financial resources on an
unprecedented scale without the need for
complex and cost-intensive money laundering
schemes. Some actors will provide highly
specialised services catering to a relatively
small group of clients. These services may
include the infiltration of control systems or
the physical infiltration of companies using
sophisticated identity fraud scams with information
gathered from online intrusion and
reconnaissance.
Serious and organised crime will continue
to target vulnerable people for exploitation
and seek to open up new pools of potential
clients for illicit goods and services. However,
patterns of criminal activities and the groups
of people targeted as victims and clients will
change over the next decade. The elderly, a
growing segment of society, will emerge as
a main target and client group for organised
crime. Criminal actors will seek to exploit
elderly people and offer new services tailored
to them. Shifts in routes and movement
patterns may involve the increasing targeting
of EU citizens for their trafficking to emerging
markets for sexual or labour exploitation.
Legal business structures will be targeted on
an unprecedented scale, even more than was
previously the case, both as victims of crime
and as targets of infiltration to be used as
vehicles for other criminal activities.
EUROPOL / Exploring tomorrow’s organised crime / 2015