«Today’s mafias are increasingly hybrid, balanced between analogue reality and digital virtuality. A world in continuous, rapid evolution, a reality ignored by official reports which continue, mistakenly, to consider cybercrime and organized crime as two different and unrelated entities.” She stated it Antonio Nicasojournalist and scholar of mafia-type criminal phenomena, professor at Queen’s University Canada, speaking in the Montecitorio press room at the presentation of the report «Cyber organized crime – Mafias in cyberspace» edited by the Magna Grecia Foundation.
«From the examination of the types of crimes of the last ten years, according to FBI and DEA data – Nicaso recalled – it emerges that the most important Cosa Nostra families continue to be strongly linked to traditional predatory activities, with the exception of the online gambling, and how young people are relatively few and the age of the suspects is high; but if the focus shifts to the ‘Ndrangheta, we see a growing involvement of computer ‘pirates’, until the recent, important discovery of a German hacker who ended up in a hamlet of a municipality in the province of Crotone in the pay of an ‘ndrina. The hacker escaped, managing to cover his tracks, but first had time to extract cryptocurrencies and plan a whole series of investments through new recycling channels.”
The report essentially highlights how and how quickly mafias are transforming, moving from extortion to ransomware, from physical drug dealing centers to web markets: the new frontier is cyberspace, where organized crime now acts “in a structured, strategic and coordinated way ».
