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Artificial intelligence is turbocharging crime syndicates into an $82 billion-a-year illicit empire that is draining the federal budget, driving up insurance premiums and recruiting young people into an alarming national wave of criminals for hire.
In a rare interview, Heather Cook, the chief executive of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, said criminal networks were “optimising” the use of new technology to drive a wave of scams, violent assault, white-collar crime and money-laundering, all of which were pushing up business and hip pocket costs and eating into social services resources.
Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission chief executive, Heather Cook.
In 2025, ACIC warned the combined hit to the economy from serious and organised crime was $82.3 billion, representing about 3.2 per cent of Australia’s GDP, but Cook told The Australian Financial Review that figure was set to spike higher when new estimates are unveiled in November.
“It is going up. I can tell you it has gone up,” she said. “That’s bigger than the [$63.2 billion] annual defence budget. It’s money that is not being spent on critical services for Australians.”
The biggest proportion of this cost is linked to the illicit drug trade and related economic losses from spending on illegal substances, lost productivity, health impacts and
But the economic toll is also seen in tax evasion and financial crimes and superannuation, banking, investment and NDIS fraud, as well as illegal tobacco and weapons smuggling and associated crimes such as extortion and arson during gang turf wars.
“Syndicates are operating in a much more decentralised way. They’re operating like multinational businesses,” said Cook.
“They’re prepared to purchase services, criminal services that are available now, whether that’s through money laundering, digital asset services, violence as a service, insiders and enablers, to get their products into a country across borders,” she said.
Alliances of criminal syndicates were melding when it was in their financial interests to do so, but turf wars were also causing a surge in violence, shootings and fire bombings, Cook said. “There’s still a lot of vying for market control.”
At the same time, criminal enterprises were also harnessing artificial intelligence to engage in mass online scamming and train bots on victims.
High-end technology was helping to “digitally move money and assets around onshore and offshore at speed and scale with very little human intervention,” creating major hurdles for authorities in detecting it, she said.
“It’s certainly enabling crime to access their profits and reinvest them in other criminal activity, or get the wealth out of their criminal activity,” said Cook.
“Technology in general is such a significant enabler of crime, and it’s certainly the most significant evolution that we’ve seen in the recent past of how crime is operating.
“AI just adds another layer of complexity to that and opportunity to that.”
In one of the most shocking rising trends of the past year, young people were being lured as guns-for-hire through gaming and social media platforms by syndicates operating offshore, outsourcing shootings and arson attacks.
“There’s been a rapid uptick, and I think we can see that in a number of recent arrests,” said Cook.
“There is an ability to use social media and online platforms and gaming platforms to reach more victims or more potential recruits,” she said, adding that young people, “attracted to the intrigue and adventure” were actively bidding for jobs to make a fast buck.
“They have no ability to know who’s directing them. They don’t really care, and they’re very easy to manipulate. They’re vulnerable. They’re attracted to the money,” she said.
“Young people simply don’t consider the consequences, and criminal networks are exploiting those vulnerabilities, and they’re doing it with a complete disregard for the impact on these young people.”
Many of the outsourced crimes are linked to territorial fights over Australia’s vast black market in cigarettes. More than half of the tobacco consumed in Australia last year was bought illegally.
Australia levies one of the highest tobacco excises and has the most expensive legal cigarettes in the world, and both the Coalition and One Nation have said they would drastically curtail excise to undercut criminal activity.
Cook would not weigh in on policy decisions, but revealed that a powerful, entrenched syndicate was behind the “orchestrated and aggressive” surge in black-market sales since 2024.
The ACIC was tackling the tobacco underworld in the way it tackled all forms of organised crime, said Cook.
“You identify the network responsible. You identify its operating model and enablers and how it’s succeeding, and you start targeting that,” she said.
“Our job and the job of law enforcement is to tackle all of these syndicates at their source.”
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Nicola Smith is The Australian Financial Review’s Foreign affairs and defence correspondent. She was formerly the Canberra bureau chief and a foreign correspondent covering Asia and the European Union. She joined the Financial Review in 2025. Reach Nicola securely on Signal @niccijsmith.03. Email Nicola at nicci.smith@afr.com
