The Detica/John Grieve report is based on an analysis of 7000 separate documentary sources examining four key areas: technologies, activities, group characteristics and offending types. The conclusion is that “we are entering a ‘fourth great era’ of organized crime – the ‘age of digital crime’ – as online and offline worlds converge.” The first age was that of gangsters and Prohibition; the second was the Black Market of post-war years; and the third was drugs-related international crime cartels.
Now, says the report, “online networks and new forms of ‘electronic’ value threatens a fourth era of organized crime, in which both traditional crime gangs and new types of organization can prosper and grow.” But more optimistically it believes that we are at the tipping point right now: “the evidence suggests new digital crime empires are not yet consolidated – and we can disrupt and prevent them, providing that we re-shape our assumptions about what digital crime is, who its perpetrators are, and address the true nature of the threat.”
The first stage in this disruption has to be an understanding of the threat. At an academic level Detica’s report separates organized crime into six separate categories: ‘swarms’, ‘hubs’, 'clustered hybrids’, ‘extended hybrids’, ‘aggregates’ and ‘hierarchies’. But at a higher level, it notes that 25% of gangs are less than 6 months old while there are more gang members aged over 35 than under 25.
The report also warns that online crime might not be the whole purpose of organized digital crime, but that it is being used as an entry-point to offline criminal behavior. This is not so surprising when the report indicates that existing off-line ‘traditional’ gangs are going digital. It demonstrates that the main offline criminalities (extortion, gambling, drugs, money laundering, counterfeiting, sex and prostitution, and simple violence) all now have their online equivalents. “Digital environments have therefore enhanced rather than replaced the existing varieties of criminal organizations and this, in turn, has accelerated the convergence of online and offline crime.”
But “to combat the problems that exist,” Kenny McKenzie, head of law enforcement at BAE Systems Detica told Infosecurity, “we must act now. The report suggests that new digital crime empires are not yet consolidated – and we can disrupt and prevent them, providing that we re-shape our assumptions about what digital crime is, who its perpetrators are, and address the true nature of the threat.” The report underlines that these are global issues and collaboration is required. “Interventions and solutions,” he continued, “can only be partly mediated by law enforcement agencies since they also inevitability lie in the hands of a wider community of technical experts and private enterprise. The report suggests that the need for wider, more effective forms of partnership have not just been recognized, but have begun to be implemented.”