Organized crime isn’t always what we imagine. It does not only hide in smoky rooms or back alleys. It runs on cloud servers, encrypted messaging and spreadsheets. It operates across continents – often with the speed and structure of a multinational corporation.

Modern-day organized crime is a structured and expanding business that operates across borders, one that trades in people, data and trust. And because of the advances in technology, it’s booming.

A Criminal Economy That Rivals Legitimate Ones

Organized crime is one of the most profitable industries on earth — a sprawling, borderless business that rivals legitimate economies in scale, speed and sophistication.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that two trillion to three trillion of illicit money flows through the global financial system each year, that’s nearly three percent of global GDP. INTERPOL reports that a single international crime group can earn up to $50 billion annually, rivaling the GDP of the world’s 10th-largest economy.

Across Europe, the EU-SOCTA 2025 warns criminal networks are being “nurtured online and accelerated by AI,” and more than 70 percent of them now use legitimate business structures to conceal illicit activity.

In Asia-Pacific, UNODC documents an industrial-scale fraud economy: scam factories, trafficked workers, AI-powered automation and cryptocurrency laundering are now commonplace.

Organized crime is no longer underground, it’s an enterprise. Networks now mirror multinational corporations: diversifying portfolios, outsourcing labor and exploiting digital infrastructure to scale faster than the systems built to stop them.

From Scam Compounds to Local Victims

Organized crime today moves like a multinational enterprise — where the leaders recruit across borders, scale through digital tools and exploit people as part of its business model.

 Each year, tens of million of people are victims of human trafficking, according to advocacy groups tracking the issue. A large portion of these people are being trafficked into scam compounds where they are forced to defraud strangers online, specifically, in Southeast Asia. INTERPOL calls it a “double-edged threat,” with two sets of victims: those coerced into crime and those targeted by it. Raids in Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand have freed workers trapped in digital fraud factories mimicking corporate offices, complete with quotas and performance targets.

Channel News Asia  revealed how entire scam compounds operate like technology firms. Workers — many trafficked under false job ads — are coerced into conducting global investment and romance scams. In one cross-border raid, authorities seized 84 computers, 279 phones and 150 storage devices, along with deepfake content generated by AI tools.

In Northern Europe, Operational Taskforce GRIMM is confronting a new model of Violence-as-a-Service — in which teenagers are recruited online to carry out attacks across the Nordics for pay, coordinated via encrypted apps and compensated through digital wallets.

In Latin America, organized crime networks resemble multinational corporations. From fentanyl production in Mexico to real-estate portfolios in Brazil, groups integrate human trafficking, fraud and smuggling into unified supply chains.

In North America, law enforcement faces the downstream effects: online romance scams, crypto investment fraud and synthetic-identity money-laundering. The U.S. Treasury issued alerts about “pig-butchering” scams in which victims are emotionally manipulated to invest into fake cryptocurrency assets or another investment opportunity and then defrauded.

From forced labor in scam centers to digital mercenaries, organized crime now runs on data, logistics and automation — an ecosystem of exploitation thriving in the spaces between laws, borders and technologies.

AI: The Criminal Accelerator

The same technologies driving legitimate global business growth — cloud computing, automation and artificial intelligence — are now powering organized crime.

Examples of how AI empowers crime:

  • Deepfake videos and voice-clones are used in high-value fraud and extortion.
  • Synthetic identities created by AI to open accounts, launder money and evade detection.
  • Automated phishing campaigns generating multilingual messages with massive victim reach.
  • Crypto laundering networks accelerated by AI which analyze data, generate bank-style reports and move funds rapidly.

The World Economic Forum reports that AI-assisted malicious emails have doubled, and “AI agents” are expanding what low-skill offenders can do. INTERPOL confirms the same technology is being weaponized for exploitation and deception.

These tools make scams faster, cheaper and more convincing, and they are multiplying faster than law enforcement can manually process evidence.

These advances widen the capability gap between criminal enterprises and public safety agencies. Criminals operate unencumbered by legal or regulatory burdens, iterate quickly and scale globally – often overnight. Meanwhile, agencies face budget constraints, jurisdictional limits and legacy systems. If left unchecked, this gap will erode trust, deepen cynicism about criminal justice systems and allow criminal networks to embed further into communities.

The Leadership Moment for Public Safety

For chiefs, sheriffs and agency leaders, the realization is unsettling but necessary.
Organized crime isn’t just something happening out there — it’s operating within your community. The challenge isn’t a lack of information; it’s that the evidence is scattered across phones, digital devices, and jurisdictions.

When agencies begin connecting those data points — across divisions, neighboring cities, or regional partners — a new picture emerges. What once appeared to be isolated incidents start revealing shared suspects, common methods, and overlapping victims. Fraud cases connect to trafficking networks. Local scams link to international cash-outs. Suddenly, what once felt random begins to make sense.

Every stolen identity, every cross-border cash-out and every coerced victim is part of a larger enterprise that adapts faster than most public safety systems can respond.

When agencies fail to see those connections, three things happen:

  • Communities lose trust because scams feel unstoppable.
  • Investigators burn out chasing fragmented leads.
  • Networks embed deeper, laundering money and influence back into society.

This is the risk every leader feels: the quiet erosion of safety, morale and control.

Fighting Crime Like a Business

The agencies making progress against organized crime have one thing in common. They fight it like it is a business.

  • They are building digital intelligence ecosystems that turn data into actions they can take.
  • They collaborate across agencies and borders, not just within departments.
  • They measure speed to clarity, tracking how quickly investigators can surface the first actionable lead.
  • They follow the money, from crypto wallets to cash-out points, to hit criminal profits, not just their foot soldiers.

When global ATM hackers left traces across devices and jurisdictions, investigators using Cellebrite solutions connected evidence from multiple countries to identify and dismantle the ring — proving how cross-border data integration can expose even the most sophisticated financial crimes.

In Latin America, the same technology helped uncover an international human-trafficking network that was luring young girls into exploitation across borders. What began as a single rescue operation by the Brazilian Border Police Battalion evolved into the exposure of a weapons, drugs and trafficking enterprise — showing how digital investigative solutions can reveal the full scope of organized crime ecosystems hidden behind everyday transactions.

When agencies leverage digital evidence at scale, as in efforts to disrupt and dismantle gangs with digital intelligence, the arrests dismantle operations, protect victims and restore safety to communities. Accessing devices they use in their operations, understanding those connections, and sharing that insight quickly, is how agencies can stay ahead. Modern policing depends on linking data and sharing intelligence to build the full picture faster, before crime scales and communities pay the price.

The Bottom Line

Organized crime is no longer a shadow economy. It is a global enterprise with regional offices, revenue targets with a whole research and development arm creating the most effective deceptive practices. Its operations are agile, coordinated, and increasingly embedded in digital evidence — hidden in the devices, data, and platforms people use every day. 

If public safety leaders do not adapt, the criminal economy will continue embedding into everyday life across all facets of society – from rural communities to cities, in prisons and in digital spaces.

At Cellebrite, our mission is helping agencies see what the criminals already see. That means the connections, the networks and the patterns, so communities can act faster, protect better and stop any erosion of trust.

Learn more about how agencies worldwide are using digital evidence to connect the dots, dismantle criminal networks and protect their communities.

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