Younger, more violent and elusive: A picture of Australia’s new organised criminals

Australian criminal networks are increasingly weaponising digital and financial technology to wash cash at an unprecedented scale, creating pools of dirty money that can be used to fund an ever-expanding portfolio of criminal enterprises.

That’s the bleak assessment of Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission national manager Chris Davey, who told the Australian Institute of Criminology’s 2026 conference on transnational serious and organised crime in Canberra last week that underworld players are smarter, faster and more tech-savvy than ever before.

Davey said this was narrowing the window of opportunity for law enforcement agencies and intelligence officers to identify and disrupt the billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains flowing in and out of Australia every year.

“We’re having less of an opportunity to intercept real cash because it’s actually been turned into digital assets and wealth transfer is happening much faster,” he said during an address. “The window for law enforcement and intelligence to identify these things is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.”

Just last year, investigators dismantled a sophisticated money-laundering syndicate in Queensland that was allegedly using a security company’s armoured transport unit to transfer millions of dollars in cash into cryptocurrency following an 18-month multi-agency investigation. Officers are probing more than $190 million in suspicious cryptocurrency transactions suspected of potentially being connected to the scheme.

Davey also pointed to the so-called tobacco wars in Victoria and recent public executions in New South Wales as examples of criminal groups becoming increasingly violent as they try to break into new markets and push rivals out of lucrative trades.

“Global illicit markets are billion-dollar enterprises, and they attract new players with a faster ability to harness new technology, looking to use extreme violence to stake claim over further market share.”

He said gangland bosses, such as tobacco kingpin Kazem “Kaz” Hamad, were increasingly based overseas in locations with access to “first world communications technology and transport infrastructure, but third world governance”.

Davey, who estimates about 70 per cent of Australia’s “adversaries” are based abroad, said this enabled gangland figures to coordinate operations remotely and outsource dirty work like firebombings, drive-by shootings and murders to foot soldiers thousands of kilometres away.

“This frees them up to be more strategic in their approach and planning, so they can put on multiple plots in place at any one particular time,” he said.

This often involves flooding the border with tonnes of drug and tobacco shipments or saturating money laundering channels with millions, if not billions, of ill-gotten cash, in the hope enough will make it through existing checks and balances to make a profit.

He said children were increasingly becoming the recruitment targets “to flesh out soldiers on the ground” for groups because they attract lesser sentences and have lower profiles.

In Victoria, syndicates have been known to take advantage of the youth crime crisis to “hire” disaffected boys and young men looking for fast cash and social media clout for quick, high-risk jobs through encrypted apps.

“We’re seeing far less physical, real-world infrastructure and far more enterprises being generated in an ecosystem that exists entirely on the internet that is incredibly hard for law enforcement to identify,” Davey said.

This includes lone actors, who might be able to hatch a plan, build a lethal 3D-printed firearm and execute it without raising alarm bells in the “real world”, which makes anticipating and disrupting a plot much harder for investigators.

Davey also predicted drugs would become deadlier as criminal groups look for more powerful substances and new strains of drugs as ways to reduce costs. Criminals would also expand the use of online fraud, theft and extortion to rake in large-scale profits, and feature more dangerous and volatile players groomed young by today’s criminal masterminds.

“Future transnational serious organised crime will remain strategic, networked and highly adaptive. It’ll look a lot like today, but it will be faster, more elusive, and extremely well-connected,” he said.

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