The Global Organized Crime Index 2023 paints a bleak picture: criminality is increasing but resilience to it is not. Building resilience to organized crime needs more than a robust criminal justice infrastructure. It requires a host of incremental changes to reshape the landscapes that provide fertile ground for organized crime. Until that happens, parts of the world will continue to make way for criminal enterprise. In such places, where organized crime operates not in the shadows but in plain sight on an industrial scale, the demand for a criminal labour force is insatiable. Those who supply this demand exist in a grey zone that makes it hard to discern who is a victim, who is a perpetrator, and who may in fact be both.

A spectrum of victims and perpetrators

The Index provides insight into the categories of criminals involved in organized crime – foreign and domestic groups, networks, the private sector and state-embedded actors. The convergence of criminal markets and the complexity of criminal profiles are starkly evident in financial crimes. Scams linked to investment opportunities, employment, e-commerce and romance are now widespread global phenomena in places ranging from Mexico and Peru to Georgia, Israel, Cambodia and Ukraine.

Take Myanmar, the country with the highest criminality score in the world (8.15 out of 10), according to the Index rankings. This is partly due to the 2021 coup, which entrenched crime and shattered the country’s already fragile resilience architecture. In Myanmar and elsewhere in the Mekong region, the labour force recruited to commit financial crimes in casinos and purpose-built scamming centres is made up of hundreds of thousands of people from the region and beyond. Many have been described as victims of trafficking in persons for the purpose of forced criminality. The principle that people should not be punished for the crimes they have been trafficked to commit is well grounded, but insufficiently upheld in some countries.

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