Organized Crime In The New Millennium

Organized Crime: An Evolving Challenge for U.S. Law Enforcement
sweepstakes participants into believing that they had won substantial cash prizes. This money
would have purportedly been sent to the victims once they paid the required taxes and fees.
Ultimately, there was no lottery prize, and the fraud netted about $2 million. 69 Estimates indicate
that today’s AFF networks only need to dupe 1% of the people or businesses they reach to turn a
profit. 70
Cyberspace, Electronic Information, and Organized Crime
As the history of AFF may indicate, organized criminals have adapted to the digital age by
becoming expert at stealing information stored and shared electronically. Many are adept at
manipulating and defrauding victims in the virtual world. All of this covers a range of activity
including cyber intrusions into corporate databases, the theft of individual consumer credit card
information, and a wide variety of fraudulent online activity. The criminal groups operating in
cyberspace can be broken into two categories: (1) part-timers—those who leverage digital
information to enhance other activities, and (2) full-timers—those who solely commit and
specialize in online or digital crimes. 71 While this is a helpful distinction to draw for discussion
purposes, it is difficult to attribute specific volumes of criminal activity to each category of
actors. General statistics suggest that organized criminals from both categories play a large role in
online data theft. For instance, in selected data breaches investigated by Verizon and the U.S.
Secret Service (USSS) involving businesses around the globe during 2009, 85% of compromised
computer records were attributed to organized crime. As 94% of all compromised records in this
study were in the financial services sector, many of those records targeted by organized criminals
were likely from financial organizations as well. 72
Online Identity Theft and Sophisticated Credit Card Fraud
Organized criminals are involved in stealing the identities of online consumers and have engaged
in technologically advanced credit card fraud. These illicit ventures pilfer from the bank accounts
of ordinary citizens and often cast a wide net to maximize the number of victims.
Some organized crime groups have stolen money from victims on intenet auction sites such as
eBay. For example, on March 13, 2010, Georgi Boychev Georgiev, a Bulgarian national pleaded
guilty in U.S. federal court to laundering money for a transnational criminal network involved in
eBay fraud. The scam did not physically exist in the United States, but it accrued more than $1.4
69 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Six Defendants Sentenced in Manhattan Federal Court for Their Involvement in a
Multi-Million-Dollar Lottery Telemarketing Fraud Scheme,” press release, July 1, 2011, http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/
press-releases/2011/six-defendants-sentenced-in-manhattan-federal-court-for-their-involvement-in-a-multi-milliondollar-lottery-telemarketing-fraud-scheme.
70 Blaise J. Bergiel, Erich B. Bergiel, and Phillip W. Balsmeir, “Internet Cross Border Crime: A Growing Problem,”
Journal of Website Promotion, vol. 3, no. 3/4 (2008), p. 135.
71 This parallels the first two elements in Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo’s three-part typology of criminal activity in
cyberspace. The typology includes “(1) traditional organized crime groups which make use of ICT [information and
communications technologies] to enhance their terrestrial criminal activities; (2) organized cybercrime groups which
operate exclusively online; and (3) organized groups of ideologically and politically motivated individuals who make
use of ICT to facilitate their criminal conduct.” See Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, “Organized Crime Groups in
Cyberspace: A Typology,” Trends in Organized Crime, vol. 11, no. 3 (September 2008), pp. 271.
72 Wade Baker et al., 2010 Data Breach Investigations Report: A Study Conducted by the Verizon RISK Team in
Cooperation with the United States Secret Service, Verizon, July 2010, pp. 2-15, http://www.verizonbusiness.com/
resources/reports/rp_2010-data-breach-report_en_xg.pdf.
Congressional Research Service 13