October 2024

The countdown has now begun - there is less than a year to go until the third edition of the Global Organized Crime Index is out. Drawing on organized crime experts from around the world, we’re making progress with the second-to-last round of score verification, namely thematic scoring for 193 countries.

As you may know, for these thematic reviews experts evaluate criminality and resilience indicators across a whole region, comparing countries against each other so that scores are calibrated to ensure comparability. And over the course of the next couple of months, we’ll be finalizing the scores and moving forward with the analysis underpinning the accompanying Global Organized Crime Index report.

But beyond the development of the next edition of the Index, we continue to explore the 2023 Index findings in different forms and formats. Following a conference on the social use of confiscated criminal assets held in Italy last month, in October we published a blog piece that explores the links between the Index’s social protection resilience indicators and the benefits of adopting measures centered around the social reuse of confiscated assets, framing them as key anti-organized crime tools and highlighting EU-wide implementation efforts in this area. And while you’re at it, have a look at the other publications we have produced so far.

We also have a brand new podcast episode out now, looking at the Mocro mafia - a collection of independent but often collaborative criminal groups - ?and their involvement in the cocaine business in Europe and elsewhere. Tune in to learn more about these criminal actors and have a listen to previous episodes on our website or check out our YouTube Channel for the accompanying videos.

But analyzing Index findings is only part of what we do. All throughout the year we continue to engage with different stakeholders (including many of you) around the Index results and how the tool can be used to address different needs. This month for example, the GI-TOC partnered with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy to host an executive course on Organised Crime and Security Policy. As part of the event, a session was dedicated to the Global Organized Crime Index to help participants understand the considerations behind measuring a phenomenon as clandestine as organized crime and using information to better tailor anti-organized crime policies. Among our other engagements, we presented the Index in a Lightening Talk on emerging trends in the justice and rule of law sector, hosted by GiZ on their sector platform Seneca.gov.?

Want to know more? Send us your questions!

We really appreciate your ongoing support and are committed to always keeping you updated on our work. In order to make our content more personalized and engaging every month, we want to hear more from you. Have a question about how the Index works? Are you curious about a specific global trend? Let us know!

How it works: Send us your question in the box below. We’ll select a random question(s) from the submissions and share the answer in our next newsletter. Our goal is to encourage dialogue with our subscribers and share knowledge – sharing is caring!

Without further ado, after receiving lots of great submissions last month, we were finally able to settle on one of your questions:?

"Can you highlight 1 or 2 major trends in criminality going on in all 193 countries?"

Each country's context is different and nuanced, so making generalizations of crime trends that ring true and span the entire globe would be impossible. Because the 2025 Index results haven’t been finalized yet, any lines of analysis would, as of yet, be tentative. Still, the expert input we received over the course of the 2023 Index suggests a very high probability of the scope and scale of cyber-dependent crime rising in the coming years. This trend was observed regionally and merits a fact-check and a more detailed analysis that, of course, would be covered in the accompanying report, once the 2025 Index scores are finalized and confirmed.?

But let’s have a look at a possible hypothesis that would explain the expert-predicted rise of cyber-dependent crime during the development of the last Index. To begin with, the cyber domain is rapidly becoming a more important medium for organized crime groups to commit crime, including types of crime that depend solely on the use of a computer, computer network or other forms of information communications technology (ICT). Undoubtedly, the once-in-a-lifetime COVID-19 pandemic has also had a large impact on cybercrime in general. The global health crisis was the perfect prerequisite criminal groups needed to begin to adapt and exploit new opportunities and mechanisms to commit crime faster and with less risk of being caught via the cyber domain. While COVID-19 has dwindled, unfortunately, these criminal activities may be here to stay.

The Internet and emerging technology have played their role in broadening the opportunities that criminals have, with virtually everyone in the world being at risk of becoming a victim as cybercrime transcends physical borders. A very good example of this would be the positive correlation (0.31) found between overall levels of resilience and cyber-dependent crime, observed in the 2023 edition of the Index. These results suggest that countries with high levels of resilience to organized crime are just as likely to have a well-developed cyber-dependent crimes market as countries with low levels of resilience. One explanation would be that wealthy, developed states, which tend to be more resilient, are a target for cyber-dependent crimes.

And now the wheels have started to spin. With more remote areas around the globe seeing greater penetration of the Internet and technology in general, it’s difficult to imagine a reversal of this trend, which would see cybercrime go down.

Are you interested in joining the pool of over 400 experts worldwide who contribute to the Index? Now’s your chance! Sign-up to our contact list to find out how.

Until next time!

Kosyo Ivanov

Senior Analyst, Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime