Financial fraud is shifting to a service-based model, with criminals increasingly sharing infrastructure instead of building their own, analysts at OCCRP PRO warn.
The shift mirrors an earlier transformation in narco-trafficking, where vertically integrated cartels once controlled every link in the supply chain—much like the empire built by Pablo Escobar. Today, that model has given way to networks of specialists offering logistics, transport, and storage services to a range of criminal actors.
Research from the Financial Action Task Force, Europol, and Interpol suggests fraud is following the same trajectory, increasingly built on reusable networks and infrastructure that can support multiple criminal schemes at once.
In just the past week, OCCRP reported on AI-driven cybercrime in Africa, cyber fraud arrests in India, and an alleged €20 million VAT fraud scheme in Czechia—cases spanning different countries and offences but reflecting a common underlying pattern.
Interpol described the shift in a March assessment, noting that fraud has moved from the margins to the centre of organised crime, increasingly overlapping with human trafficking and cybercrime.
A Shift in Perspective
Fraud has traditionally been categorised by typology—cyber fraud, investment fraud, VAT fraud—each carrying its own legal and regulatory framework. But analysts argue criminals don’t organise themselves along those same lines, since doing so would be inefficient.
Instead, payment channels, shell companies, money mule networks, and professional facilitators are often shared across multiple schemes simultaneously. VAT and customs fraud illustrate the scale of the problem: the European Public Prosecutor’s Office estimates such fraud cost the EU and member states €45 billion last year alone, warning that it is reshaping the broader criminal landscape within the bloc.
Calls for a Coordinated Response
While typology-specific expertise remains essential for due diligence and investigations, analysts say financial institutions should also focus on identifying shared behavioural patterns—opaque corporate structures, rapid fund movement, recurring intermediaries, and unusual cross-border transactions—that cut across fraud types. Targeting this “financial plumbing,” the report argues, could allow compliance teams to disrupt multiple schemes simultaneously rather than pursuing cases one at a time.
Some progress has already been made on the public side. Interpol noted improved collaboration among law enforcement agencies, and in May, Europol launched the EU Anti-Scam Platform, a cross-border hub designed to counter the growing industrialisation of fraud.
Still, significant gaps remain, including limited regulation of cryptocurrency exchanges and incomplete beneficial-ownership registries. Until those gaps close, the report suggests, compliance teams will remain on the front lines—facing a challenge that increasingly requires dismantling shared criminal networks rather than chasing individual scams.
