Why does law enforcement believe that organized crime is on the rise again, and is this thanks to advances in information technology?
The concern I am examining in this paper is whether advances in technology have led to a rise in organized crime, in the eyes of law enforcement. Throughout the 20th century, organized crime groups thrived throughout the country and the world. It wasn’t until the last quarter of the century that the government cracked down on organized crime, breaking up many of the larger organizations and sending smaller ones into hiding. All this time under the radar has led many groups to innovate how they do business, skirting around the law and in some cases going completely undetected. It has even given birth to organized groups of hackers, who can attack individuals and companies from across the globe. This is in no small part thanks to the advances in technology and the birth of cybercrime. The question remains however: Is organized crime on the rise once again, and is technology truly at fault for it?
Authority is Constructed
To examine this topic, we first need to examine those who claim that organized crime is growing again. One such report comes directly from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The report states that thanks to a rapid growth in globalization since the turn of the century, organized crime has evolved to become a security threat as a transnational level, utilizing violence, human trafficking, smuggling and identity theft (United Nations, 2010).
Since this article comes straight from an office of the United Nations, I believe it is safe to assume they have broad authority on the matter and have extensively investigated the matter, arriving at their conclusion. They examined crimes on a global scale, categorized them and summarized their findings. They list the sources they used to come to their conclusions and named experts they collaborated with on the report. One thing to note is that the report does not explicitly state that organized crime has resurged, only that it has effectively gone global. The obvious conclusion to draw from this though is that organized crime has room to grow on the global market, which I will touch on later. They also note that, while relatively tame at the moment, as time goes on more cybercrimes will take place, and they will occur more frequently and widespread than when this report was written (United Nations, 2010).
Another article which was released in 2020 also claims that organized crime is on the rise, but barely addresses it. This article from GlobalEdge states that organized crime is on the rise in the form of organized retail crime, and “boosting” where merch stolen from retail stores is sold online, undercutting company profits. They also address the rise in identity theft, and unemployment fraud caused by criminal groups during the Covid-19 pandemic (Johnson, 2021).
When investigating GlobalEdge, I found that they are a “marketing agency” based out of Toronto, Canada; hardly a valid authoritative body to base these claims on. Not only that but the article in question cites no sources for its information, calling the validity and authority of it’s claims even further into question. The author, Mallory Johnson, has written many financial articles for GlobalEdge, but that also does not provide much authority to support the claims, and information in the article. While the aspect of “boosting” and identity theft would correlate with technology having an affect on organized crime, the authority of the author and the information in the article simply can’t stand up on its own, making this article a perpetuator of the moral panic we stated before (Johnson, 2021). Now that a foundational examination of the claims has been established, let’s investigate the claim, and research it strategically.
Research as Strategic Exploration
As our lives have grown more and more intertwined with the Internet and technology on a global scale, naturally so has much else, from business to recreation, and criminal activity as well. Organized crime today looks much different than it did in the past; many different groups and individuals do business together and collaborate towards a certain illicit goal. These can take the form of many kinds of online activities, from online drug markets and piracy sites to hackers, phishing scams, as well as human trafficking (Grabosky, 2007). Much of this is done from the Dark Web, the unregulated “wild west” corner of the internet where these illicit actions run rampant. This online freedom has enabled many groups to exist and even thrive, protected by online anonymity and a degree of protection from law enforcement.
Over time, more and more of these online cyber-criminals have popped up, and organized into loose, yet incredibly large groups from all over the world. While many are involved in physical crimes, some of them have become entirely digitally based ventures, making them harder to track by law enforcement and even more dangerous in this highly digital age (Di Nicola, 2022).
One such venture is Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), in which ransomware developers allow malware kits to be rented out by unskilled users to commit crimes. This led to an explosion in ransomware attacks by online hacker groups in the late 2010’s and early 2020’s. Since the introduction of RaaS to the Dark Web, recorded intrusion attempts and successful attacks on organizations worldwide have skyrocketed and given rise to organized “affiliate-hacker groups”, such as DarkSide, REvil, and Dharma (Oosthoek et al., 2022). These groups are widely networked, often collaborating to share information and resources. This enables them to be highly effective at compromising and extorting victims, which has led to them bringing in millions per year in ill-gotten gains. While crackdowns on RaaS and transnational hacker groups have been effective in the past year, many of them still run rampant, extorting individuals and companies across the globe.
Not only has criminal operations changed and evolved, but the very understanding of organized crime has changed as well. Traditionally, we think of organized crime as having bosses, enforcers, regular gang members, and the like; modern organized crime hardly resembles that strict top-down mold. Usually, they rely more on a function-based model: those who committed the crimes, those who provide the tools to achieve their goals, and those who work to cover up the crimes committed. Not all modern organized crime groups follow this example, but many of them resemble a rough semblance of it. Even then, the members of a group regularly collaborate with members of other criminal groups, working towards a goal and splitting the profits among themselves equally (Leukfeldt. et al, 2017).
While exploring the different avenues organized crime could have used to grow, it was important to consider the ways they could use technology and globalization. The most important avenues I investigated were the Dark Web and cybercrime, which ended up opening new avenues of research for me. If I had more time to investigate this topic, I could potentially find hundreds of new avenues they have used or could use to grow their illicit activities with.
Conclusion
As you can see from my findings, there may be something to this claim after all. Some of the articles claiming organized crime is on the rise may be overblown or misinformed, but research does seem to back up the claim as far back as 2010, as seen in the UN’s crime report. While it is not explicitly stated that organized crime is on the rise again, evidence clearly shows that it has changed in how it operates thanks to globalization and advanced in technology. Criminals have started utilizing the Internet and the unregulated Dark Web for much of their illicit actions. Not only that, but some criminal groups have started going entirely digital with their operations. Traditional organized crime groups have changed to adopt a sort of “function over form” style of operating, allowing them effectively to utilize the new tools afforded to them by evolving technology.
While, at least to some extent, this moral panic has been repeated time and again, it seems to carry some weight to its concern. When examining organized crime combined with technological advances and globalization, a sort of evolution and growth does indeed appear to be occurring. These groups are utilizing online tools and a large pool of global manpower to go about their business and continue to operate, regardless of law enforcement’s attempts to crack down on it. All these different avenues of growth appear to be present, and if I had more time to examine them all, I feel confident I could find even more than were mentioned in this paper. With all that said in regard to the evidence we’ve examined; this moral panic appears to be a valid issue to be taken seriously, not just a drummed-up panic perpetuated by media or law enforcement. The issue of resurging organized crime needs to be an issue we take seriously, lest we repeat the decades of crime and turmoil that it wrought in the 20th century, but in this new, globalized form.
Works Cited:
Di Nicola, A. Towards digital organized crime and digital sociology of organized crime. Trends Organ Crim (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-022-09457-y
Grabosky, P. The Internet, Technology, and Organized Crime. Asian Criminology 2, 145–161 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-007-9034-z
Johnson, M. (2021, September 15). Organized crime on the rise. globalEDGE Blog: Organized Crime on the Rise, globalEDGE Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://globaledge.msu.edu/blog/post/57018/organized-crime-on-the-rise
Leukfeldt, E.R., Lavorgna, A. & Kleemans, E.R. Organised Cybercrime or Cybercrime that is Organised? An Assessment of the Conceptualisation of Financial Cybercrime as Organised Crime. Eur J Crim Policy Res 23, 287–300 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007
Oosthoek, K., Cable, J., & Smaragdakis, G. (2022). A Tale of Two Markets: Investigating the Ransomware Payments Economy. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.05028. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.05028
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (2010). The globalization of crime – A transnational organized crime threat assessment. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/tocta-2010.html