Informed by its analysis of the prevailing threat, SOCTA 2013 identifies a number of
key priorities: facilitated illegal immigration, trafficking in human beings, synthetic
drugs and poly-drug trafficking, missing trader intra-community fraud, the production
and distribution of counterfeited goods, cybercrime and money laundering.18
Furthermore, SOCTA 2013 highlights the continuing evolution of an allegedly new
breed of “network-style” organised crime groups, defined much less by their ethnicity
or nationality than has been the case hitherto, and much more by their capacity to
operate on an international basis, with multiple partners and in multiple crime areas
and countries. The pyramidal structures have evolved to networks of cells with
continuously changing partners and even locations. Europol states that this calls for
a shift in the strategic response in the EU, away from one centred on individual
ethnic types, or even individual crime areas, towards a more flexible, heterogeneous
model of targeting these dynamic organised crime networks, through a more
effective use of cross-border mechanisms to exchange information and co-ordinate
operational activity. These could also be proposed for the Council of Europe and
should be politically unproblematic for those member states that have ratified
UNTOC.19