‘INDUSTRIAL SCALE’: Europol Issues Warning as Recruiting of Children for Criminal Acts Surges
Killer children are the new frontier in European organized crime.
Western Europe is seeing a surge in criminality, and not even children are spared the impact of this phenomenon.
Top law enforcement officials are sounding the alarm on this growing – and terrifying – trend of underage kids being ‘recruited and groomed online by criminal gangs to commit heinous acts’.
“’It’s like a cheap build-your-own contract killer scheme’, Catherine De Bolle, who until last month was executive director of Europol, the European Union’s police agency, told ABC News. And the problem of violence as a service, she said, is occurring on an ‘industrial scale’.
‘Now, with the usage of artificial intelligence, with the new technology, and with the fact that so many youngsters are on digital platforms, it’s heaven for criminal networks’, De Bolle said. ‘This is really worrying us’.”
De Bolle, former executive director of the EU’s police agency Europol, says criminal networks have no borders — and the digital environment is borderless as well.
Officials alert for the rise of ‘violence as a service’, as gangs embrace the power of the internet.
“Officials say it is simply a computer-age twist on how criminal organizations find unsuspecting teens to do their dirty work: they lurk on gaming sites and messaging apps, seeking to recruit kids as young as 13. The result is child foot soldiers hired as hitmen, becoming both the perpetrators of crime and the victims of criminals.
The trend so concerned European law enforcement that Europol formed a working group last year to combat the problem. Called the Grimm Task Force — named for the Brothers Grimm’s dark and dangerous, cautionary fairytales — it specifically targets violence as a service and the recruitment of young perpetrators into serious, organized crime.”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/06/industrial-scale-europol-issues-warning-as-recruiting-children/