AI-Enabled Organized Crime Expands Across Europe

March 18, 2025

Europol’s EU Serious and Organized Crime Threat Assessment (EU-SOCTA) 2025 highlights the rapid expansion of organized crime exploiting AI throughout Europe. Criminal networks are harnessing AI for cyber fraud, ransomware, money laundering, and child exploitation, while AI-enhanced social engineering and automation make criminal activities more scalable and difficult to detect. As a response, it is crucial to establish trustworthy AI governance to address these challenges and ensure safe and secure AI practices.

JOIN US in the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) initiative to help shape responsible AI practices and prevent harm across Europe.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.666, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.662, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.660, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: organized-crime-groups
Alleged developer: various-generative-ai-developers
Alleged harmed parties: general-public-of-the-european-union

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/994

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.