Europol 2026 Report: AI Now Powers Cybercrime — What It Means for Your Family
🤖 AI: the new weapon of scammers
The era of typo-riddled emails promising improbable inheritances is over. Today, artificial intelligence lets criminals impersonate your bank manager or company director with realistic voice, tone and vocabulary — making them extremely hard to detect even for vigilant people.
Before a human scammer even gets involved, automated chatbots sort potential victims, identify the most vulnerable, and set a personalised trap. This is what Europol calls agentic criminal AI — an artificial intelligence capable of running a scam operation from start to finish without any human involvement.
Warehouses packed with hundreds of SIM cards can send thousands of fraudulent texts simultaneously. A network of 7 Latvian nationals was dismantled with 1,200 boxes, 40,000 active cards across 80 countries.
🔒 120 ransomware groups — a record high
Europol recorded more than 120 active ransomware groups in Europe last year. When one is dismantled, it simply changes its name, picks up leaked tools available online and starts again.
Some go even further: in September 2025, three of the most feared groups — DragonForce, LockBit and Qilin — publicly announced their coalition on the dark web. An unprecedented move in a world where distrust is normally the golden rule.
🌑 The dark web is reorganising
Large criminal marketplaces are giving way to smaller, more specialised shops that are harder to locate and shut down. When Europol closes one, another appears almost immediately. Archetyp Market — 600,000 users — was taken offline in June 2025. A month later, BlackOps opened with 42,000 illicit products in its catalogue.
👶 Children increasingly targeted
The most alarming chapter of the report concerns minors. Reports of financial sextortion — children coerced into sending money after being trapped with their own intimate images — jumped 70% between the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2025.
Adding to this is the emergence of AI-generated child sexual abuse material that is overwhelming investigators' analytical capacity.
- Phone scams are now undetectable — voice and tone are replicated by AI
- Your children are prime targets through online games and social media
- Fraudulent texts arrive in massive volumes — thousands per second via SIM farms
- Ransomware targets individuals too — not just businesses
✅ How to protect yourself in this new reality
- Never trust a voice on the phone — even if it sounds like your bank or a loved one. Hang up and call back on the official number yourself
- Talk to your children about online risks — sextortion, fake competitions, fake friends
- Install antivirus software on all your devices — Bitdefender blocks ransomware sites before they load
- Use a VPN — to encrypt your communications and prevent certain network attacks
- Never pay a ransom — it encourages criminals and doesn't guarantee data recovery
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