Europol's 2025 report warns that organized crime groups are increasingly using AI-powered scams, payment systems, and generative AI to produce child sexual abuse material, scale operations globally, and make criminal activities harder to detect.
Europol published its EU Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2025 report revealing how organized crime networks are leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance their operations. The report describes criminals using AI to craft messages in multiple languages, create realistic deepfakes for impersonation and blackmail, and produce child sexual abuse material through generative AI. These technologies enable criminal networks to automate and scale up operations globally while making them more difficult for law enforcement to detect. In late February, Europol arrested two dozen people for distributing AI-generated child abuse images, marking one of the first major operations targeting this new form of digital exploitation. The agency also dismantled the MATRIX encrypted messaging service used for international drug and arms trafficking in December. The report identifies seven key criminal threats accelerated by AI: cyber attacks, online fraud schemes, online child sexual exploitation, migrant smuggling, drug trafficking, firearms trafficking, and waste crime. Europol warns that fully autonomous AI systems could eventually lead to entirely AI-controlled criminal networks operating without human guidance.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
Using AI systems to gain a personal advantage over others such as through cheating, fraud, scams, blackmail or targeted manipulation of beliefs or behavior. Examples include AI-facilitated plagiarism for research or education, impersonating a trusted or fake individual for illegitimate financial benefit, or creating humiliating or sexual imagery.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed