Organized Crimes Going High-Tech With AI-Powered Tools, Europol Warns

More sophisticated organized crimes are becoming easier to arrange and pull off thanks to AI-powered tools, according to a new report from Europol.

AI is already fueling something of a crime boom in certain categories, as it makes things easier for the less competent and helps the more competent criminals scale their operations up. These include fraud, blackmail and creation of child abuse materials.

Organized crimes directly benefit from technology leaps, creating new “arms race”

Europol expects this to just be the first in a wave of revolutionary technology in the near future that will spark new “arms races” between criminals and defenders, a field that will eventually include things like quantum computing and virtual reality. AI is a cornerstone element that will likely play a role in all the organized crimes to come, however, as an organizing and learning tool.

Perhaps the most troubling element of the AI-powered crime boom is the contribution to the illicit child abuse materials trade. Criminals have found ways to slip the guardrails of tools and use them to create these images, and while EU national laws vary in how this is prosecuted the wave of material is creating added confusion and difficulty in investigating the cases involving real children.

Other types of organized crimes seeing outsized benefit from AI-powered tools include human trafficking and all types of illicit international smuggling, waste management fraud, and of course a spectrum of cyber attacks. Europol also notes the interest by state-sponsored hacking groups that deploy it to destabilize other nations and interfere with elections, as well as disable functions of critical infrastructure such as hospital services.

AI-powered tools creating new challenges, expenses for security teams

The AI-powered explosion in organized crimes will almost certainly translate into significant budget expansions. To provide a basic idea, the European Commission is already considering doubling the staff of Europol in the near future. As AI grows in its useful capability, it will also likely make it increasingly possible for entry-level criminals to simply describe to it what kind of crime they want to commit and receive all manner of useful assistance.

That is one threat, but another (that is much more immediate) is scaling power for professional criminals that already know what they’re doing. AI-powered tools can already assist them with research (such as poring through LinkedIn for scam and hacking targets), coding malware, writing and translating materials for fraud campaigns, and creating video and audio replicas of real people to fool targets. Automatic translation and rewriting allows them to run the same scams simultaneously in different parts of the world.

“Organized crimes” may also morph into “automated crimes” in the future, as every aspect from start to finish is managed and carried out by a rogue or jailbroken AI system. That includes managing of the “business end” such as recruiting new affiliates and paying out partners in crime. This scenario would be additionally challenging as it would allow criminals to almost completely shield their identities.