Gratteri at the UN: a global network against cybercrime is needed

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NEW YORK – “The dark web is the new frontier of the mafia and is therefore also the new frontier of the anti-mafia”. Nicola Gratteri, prosecutor of the Republic of Naples, uses the audience of the UN headquarters in New York to denounce, on Thursday, the technological evolution of organized crime and the “strong delay” of states in combating it with equal cyber weapons. The presentation, at the Glass Palace, of the report Cyber ​​Organized Crime – Mafias in cyberspace, published by the Magna Grecia Foundation and edited by Queen’s University professor Antonio Nicaso and Walter Rauti, coordinator of the Cyber ​​Crime Research Center of the same foundation, offers Gratteri has the opportunity to explain how organized crime has conquered spaces that see states struggling, both on the regulatory and technological fronts.

Online banks and criminal cryptocurrencies
Arriving in Naples, the prosecutor followed an investigation that saw the Camorra “capable of building an online bank, with 6,000 customers in Lombardy, Campania and Lazio, with offices also in Lithuania and Latvia”. While managing to seize around 2 and a half billion of the capital exchanged, a billion disappeared in the underground part of the internet. Among other things, the criminal banking offices were equipped with technology, of Israeli origin, capable of preventing wiretaps and shielding the physical locations of mafiosi meetings.

Gratteri specified that the cost of this software was 5 million euros, but the Italian judicial police, although managing to enter the online bank thanks to their skills, certainly cannot afford this type of expense and remains behind Germany and Holland, whose police have managed to puncture multiple platforms on the dark web.
Competent professionals in the management of cryptocurrencies are the affiliates of the ‘Ndrangheta, who in the provinces of Reggio Calabria, Vibo Valentia and Crotone use dozens of sites to extract bitcoins and produce their own electronic money. Another ‘Ndrangheta family hired German and Romanian hackers to carry out billion-dollar financial transactions which involved banks located on 3 different continents in the space of 20 minutes.

TikTok recruits social affiliates
If the Mexican mafia was the first to land on Facebook, boasting of its wealth and the lifestyle of its henchmen, TikTok is now the new employment center opened by organized crime. Gratteri explains that the popular video platform collects results not only in terms of consensus, but also in numbers of enlisted people, contacted through the platform to become “the new apprentices” destined to die in a feud between families or in clashes with the forces of order.
Drug entrepreneurs “are able to build a new WhatsApp or a new Telegram by managing to talk to each other and we are not able to listen to them”, because if it is true that the Italian judicial police is unbeatable in terms of know-how, it remained very far behind technologically. The Naples prosecutor launches a jab at those who contest the wiretaps and prefer stalking, showing evidence that the ‘Ndrangheta today is able to purchase 2,000 kilos of cocaine or 40 kilograms of gold a week without leaving the living room.
These are elite mafias and even if they are not yet completely supplanting the bribe, having taken over information technology, having conquered the web world shows that an economic, financial and influence capacity on the public has been achieved that has not been terminates easily.

The UN is needed once morest transnational crime
The security of the network, infrastructure and financial markets cannot be guaranteed without investments and the United States and China are the two countries that are spending billions of dollars to ensure protection networks from sophisticated attacks carried out also through Artificial Intelligence.
The Deputy Undersecretary for National Protection of the Department of Homeland Security, Ronald J. Clark, who spoke at the presentation, underlined how the transnationality of crimes challenges the different legislations adopted by states both in investigations and in the definitions of crimes and sentences. This is why according to Gratteri, it is the United Nations that can make the difference. “Here we should make it clear both to the countries that are at war at the moment and to those who think they are the masters of the world that the mafia problem is not a problem of democracies, but concerns all the countries of the world even the regimes totalitarians” underlines the Italian magistrate.
According to Gratteri, the UN is the place where “to create synergies to fight the mafias” and to those who prefer wars on the field or dialectical ones, the prosecutor suggests “burying the hatchet and thinking that the fight once morest the mafia concerns all countries of the world” and its citizens.
The Italian representation at the United Nations, co-sponsor of the presentation of the report, recalled that last March 28, on a proposal from Italy, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Day for the prevention and fight once morest all forms of transnational organized crime, which will be celebrated on 15 November.