Organised Crime

Organised crime encompasses a range of illicit enterprises and networks that operate across local, national and transnational arenas. These networks blend hierarchical structures and fluid alliances to traffic drugs and arms, launder money, corrupt officials and exploit legitimate businesses as fronts. Technological advances—from encrypted communications to cryptocurrencies—have enhanced their reach and resilience, enabling rapid adaptation to law-enforcement pressures. In some settings, criminal groups even provide quasi-public services, establishing alternative governance arrangements where state capacity is weak. Effective counter-measures demand coordinated intelligence-driven policing, financial oversight and international cooperation, combined with community engagement to reduce social vulnerabilities that feed organised criminal activity.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Analysis of tens of millions of cryptocurrency transactions has identified a small cadre of “multihomers” whose repeated activity on multiple dark-web marketplaces underpins overall market resilience. These elite users sustain trading volumes even after disruptive closures, revealing key vulnerabilities in illicit trade networks. Another study mapped the emergence of direct user-to-user trading around darknet platforms by tracking 31 million Bitcoin transfers. It showed that half of marketplace users form persistent bilateral relationships that endure marketplace shutdowns and external shocks, suggesting that peer-to-peer ties are as important as marketplace operators themselves. A value-chain analysis of hashish supply from source regions to European end-markets employed mixed-method field interviews and economic modelling to quantify production costs, mark-ups and distribution practices. It demonstrated how criminal actors capture over 99 % of end-user price increases through successive layers of brokers, and how these dynamics can inform targeted enforcement and alternative development programmes.

Organised Crime publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in organised crime across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Organised criminal group: A structured assemblage of three or more individuals collaborating over time to commit serious crimes for financial or material gain.

Dark web marketplace: An online platform accessed through anonymising networks where illicit goods and services—often priced in cryptocurrencies—are traded.

User-to-user (U2U) trading: Direct peer connections for illicit transactions that form outside formal marketplace mechanisms, enhancing resilience against platform closures.

Value-chain analysis: A method for disaggregating production and distribution stages to quantify costs, mark-ups and actors’ profit shares along an illicit supply route.

References

1. Policing Global Hubs: Balancing the Imperatives of Security and Trade. The British Journal of Criminology (2022).
2. The national authority in Norway is no serious economic crime office anymore? An empirical study of press releases. Journal of Economic Criminology (2023).
3. Cocaine and the port: Utopias of security, urban relations, and displacement of policing efforts in the port of Piraeus. European Journal of Criminology (2023).
4. Emergence and structure of decentralised trade networks around dark web marketplaces. Scientific Reports (2022).
5. Identifying key players in dark web marketplaces through Bitcoin transaction networks. Scientific Reports (2024).
6. Understanding the illegal drug supply chain structure: a value chain analysis of the supply of hashish to Europe. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2023).