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Legal businesses are a key enabler of organised crime, according to a report by Europol, the European Union’s policing agency based in The Hague. The report, titled, Leveraging legitimacy: How the EUโs most threatening criminal networks abuse legal business structures, follows the agencyโs April 2024 study, Decoding the EUโs Most Threatening Criminal Networks. All business sectors are potentially at risk for criminal exploitation, Europol warns.
The report points out that a legal business may be used by a criminal network unknowingly, without the business knowing it, and without the criminal network exerting any control. In a further step, a criminal network can infiltrate the business at a low level, or collude with or coerce employees. Or, a criminal network can infiltrate the business at a high level, coercing key people; or even set up its own business that it controls – one example in the report is of criminals setting up companies for the international trade of fruits, in European countries, in fact to traffic cocaine from South America to Europe.
Where the criminal use of businesses may become more systematics can be in transport and postal services, online distribution via legitimate websites and on marketplaces, marketing via social media, and retailing in legitimate stores. Or, criminals launder their proceeds of crime. Organised crime may take over healthy financial and tax record that attract less attention from tax authorities and law enforcement. Or, the criminals take over companies on the brink of bankruptcy, that can then be used as a front for crime.
Hospitality venues in particular may be exploited – for drug trafficking, extortion and racketeering, migrant smuggling, organised property crime and weapons trafficking; and such venues are also convenient as meeting places for criminal partners, and as selling points.
The report goes through various frauds carried out by organised crime; ‘criminal networks frequently establish call centres, which are run in rented apartments, warehouses or office spaces. Some call centres appear so legitimate that employees think that they are working for legitimate investment firms’. Also covered are waste trafficking; and child sexual exploitation.
For the 34-page report, visit https://www.europol.europa.eu/.
