The new report by Europol’s European Migrant Smuggling Centre (EMSC) looks into the latest developments and main threats in migrant smuggling and trafficking in human beings, based on the most recent operations supported by Europol.
The report highlights the main challenges presented by the current criminal landscape, and aims to help law enforcement step up the fight against criminal networks.
Migrant smuggling and human trafficking networks are highly adaptive and exploit geopolitical events, including economic and social crises to maximise their illegal profits. These networks swiftly identify criminal opportunities offered by the digital environment and take advantage of them to increase their illegal proceeds. Criminals abuse social media platforms, mobile applications, and cryptocurrencies to offer their illegal services, manage logistics and payments, and secure profits.
Investigations into migrant smuggling and trafficking in human beings reveal a complex and dynamic criminal environment in which actors take advantage of existing infrastructures and engage in multiple illegal activities. The links between migrant smuggling, terrorism and the financing of terrorism are of particular concern.
The main characteristics of the criminal networks involved in migrant smuggling and human trafficking:
- strong links to other crime areas and crime enablers;
- high flexibility and adaptability;
- abuse of geopolitical, economic, environmental and social crises;
- intense cooperation with other criminal networks across borders within and outside the EU;
- extension of violence towards irregular migrants, law enforcement, competitors and within the criminal networks themselves;
- increase in the digitalisation of core components of criminal activities.
Pursuant to the Money Laundering Act, obliged entities must also identify and assess the risks of terrorist financing in their risk analysis.
For the most part, obliged entities differentiate between money laundering and terrorist financing in the risk analysis. However, even if the topics are explicitly separated, the issue of terrorist financing is often only dealt with in abstract terms. In contrast, there is no comprehensive identification and assessment of the inherent and residual institution-specific risks of being misused for terrorist financing. Accordingly, the security measures are predominantly focussed solely on the prevention of money laundering. In order to also address the risks relating to terrorist financing, in addition to analysing the risk factors of customers, products and transactions as well as geographical risk, it should be noted that terrorist financing can also be generated from legal sources and the relevant typologies must be taken into account.
The new report by Europol’s European Migrant Smuggling Centre (EMSC) is available here.