Today’s serious and organised crime groups are borderless, decentralised and digitally enabled. They are increasingly embedded within legitimate systems and operate with the agility and sophistication of multinational businesses that are strategic, well-connected and quick to adapt.
We maintain a strategic focus on 8 criminal intelligence priorities. These are determined by the ACIC Board and are reflective of the scale and pace of the serious and organised crime landscape, allowing us a clear focus in delivering criminal intelligence that protects the Australian community and our national interests.
A key focus across all priority areas is that we share unique, actionable and insightful intelligence with our partners, in Australia and overseas, to help stop serious and organised crime groups and reduce their impact on Australia.
Our focus is on serious and organised crime networks who engage in drug trafficking. Drug trafficking includes importation, distribution, sale, supply, cultivation, manufacture, diversion and possession, and may include the trafficking of precursor chemicals, pharmaceuticals and veterinary substances, synthetic opioids and performance and image enhancing drugs.
The illicit drug trade poses significant socioeconomic and health risks to the Australian community. They make us all less safe, and cause physical, mental and financial harms. This emphasises the need for law enforcement and health agencies to work together. A multi-dimensional approach that targets supply, demand and harm reduction is critical to reducing drug use in Australia.
You can read more about our leading-edge coordinated national research and drug intelligence through the National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program.
Serious financial crime encompasses money laundering, fraud (including tax, revenue and Commonwealth-funded program fraud), scams, illegal betting and illicit trade in excisable goods (including illicit tobacco). It may also include other crimes designed to steal or coerce funds such as ransomware.
Serious and organised crime groups are entrenched in the illicit tobacco market, through importation, distribution and associated money laundering. Our criminal intelligence builds national knowledge of money laundering, nationally significant tax fraud and other financially motivated crimes. It helps make Australia unattractive for abusive financial arrangements and money laundering, and reduces the impact of serious financial crime on the Australian community.
Our criminal intelligence under this priority looks at insider activities linked to serious and organised crime, whether intentional or not. This includes, but is not limited to, forging and fraudulently obtaining passports, counterfeiting, and organised immigration crime.
Serious and organised crime groups actively target and recruit insiders to enable their criminal operations. This includes exploiting Australia’s borders by recruiting insiders holding Aviation and Maritime Security Identification Cards, which grant entry to secure zones at our ports and airports. This privileged access allows criminal syndicates to freely move illegal goods like drugs and weapons into our country, and creates serious risks for our supply chains and border integrity.
Technology manipulation and exploitation is more than just cybercrime. Technology is expanding opportunities for criminals across every category of crime. Our criminal intelligence reveals how technology is being used to isolate, conceal and enable criminal activity, including through cybercrime, artificial intelligence and encrypted communication, and the exploitation of emerging technologies and platforms.
This criminal intelligence priority looks at the trafficking, diversion or illicit manufacture of weapons, munitions and schematics by serious and organised crime groups. This includes firearms and their components, explosives and improvised explosive devices, and 3D-printed weapons. We look at the illicit manufacture of these weapons, which are designed or used for inflicting bodily harm or physical damage.
Our criminal intelligence improves our understanding of supply methodologies used by serious and organised crime groups in Australia, and the systemic vulnerabilities these groups are exploiting.
Serious and organised crime groups are closely involved in the commission of human exploitation – motivated by profit and engaging in any activity that increases their bottom line, regardless of the harm they cause to vulnerable people.
This criminal intelligence priority includes, but is not limited to, human trafficking, modern slavery, child sexual abuse and exploitation, transnational offending relating to human exploitation or child abuse material, where there are links to serious organised crime groups or their operations.
Our intelligence provides insight on the evolving threats and risks posed by serious and organised crime groups within the national security environment.
This criminal intelligence priority looks at how serious and organised crime groups are threatening and undermining the fabric of Australia’s national security. This includes acts or support to politically motivated violence, promotion of communal violence, and the financing of terrorism. It also examines how serious and organised crime groups act in support of espionage, foreign interference and sabotage.
This criminal intelligence priority examines how serious and organised crime groups are involved in the illicit trade of natural resources and their disregard of Commonwealth environmental or natural resource legislation. These activities could be linked to illicit wealth generation and broaden our scope to cover a greater range of serious and organised crimes. This could include plant, animal and mineral trafficking, illegal agri-business, as well as illegal mining, fishing and logging.