DARK
ECONOMY
The Dark Economy
encompasses every illegal
or unreported sale of a good or service anywhere on earth.
World Bank data and researcher estimates put the value of the Dark Economy globally at
$15 trillion a year – nearly 14% of global GDP.
Story
.png)
In July of 2024, Jackie Crenshaw celebrated her 60th birthday aboard a yacht in New York Harbor at an $80,000 party paid for, in large part, by a man she’d never met before. She'd go onto lose more than $900,000 and the home she owned for 32 years to an investment scheme that claims at least $4.4 billion every year from U.S. victims alone.
Blog
Story
In the first piece created specifically for this Dark Economy project, we introduce the multi-trillion-dollar network of transnational criminal operations laundering money through the world’s financial system.
Blog
Drug-related violence and murders in France rose by 38% between 2022 and 2023, leading to the creation of the term “narcohomicide.” According to the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) cocaine consumption in France doubled between 2022 and 2023, ranking France seventh in Europe for consumption. French authorities also seized 47 tons of cocaine in 2024 – double what they confiscated the year before.
"Access to the legitimate financial system
is a cornerstone of transnational crime.
Shell companies, offshore accounts, and digital banking services allow criminals to obscure their identities and the origin of their funds, while securely transferring billions of dollars in mere minutes."
- Matt O’Neill, former U.S. Secret Service
Special Agent in Charge of Cyber
Throughout 2025, this page will take a closer look at some crimes very familiar to the world’s fraud fighters – account opening fraud (AO), account takeover fraud (ATO), voice scams, romance scams, investor scams, and more – but likely outside of the average consumer’s realm of awareness. We’ll then explore the relationship between these cybercrimes and the rest of the Dark Economy, showcasing how money laundering accounts serve as the hub connecting AO, ATO, and a wide array of scams to the drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, terror financing, human smuggling, and laundry list of other crimes that receive front-page and top-of-newscast coverage every day.