Cyberspace: A Platform for Organized Crime

Organized crime is a multi-billion dollar business and is growing in scale. Cyberspace has become a very powerful platform that facilitates the protection of the criminal economy and its activities by means of complex technological and financial schemes. New concepts such as cybercrime and cyber money laundering are socially destabilizing practices that constitute a challenge that must be combatted. Organized crime organizations act in a transnational context, increasingly moving in large groups that have proven in the 21st century to be perfectly capable of adapting their activities to the globalized context. The cyberspace platform has contributed to an expansion of organized crime that facilitates their activities and makes it more difficult to identify the wide scope of operations that fit all kinds of crimes. Criminals move in cyberspace with an impunity that was unthinkable a few years ago. This chapter will focus on the analysis of the following issues: 1. Cyberspace as a key instrument for the spreading of criminal activities, and legal mechanisms to combat them. 2. The complexities involved in both a sociological and a legal definition of organized crime. 3. Money laundering and criminal legal instruments to combat practices such as confiscation. 4. Illegal trafficking of dual-use materials with a specific focus on illicit trafficking of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) materials and the risk posed in proliferation.