Europol warns criminal networks recruit children at industrial scale

Europol says criminal networks are treating children as a scalable part of their business model, using social media, encrypted messaging, games and e-commerce platforms to pull minors into drug trafficking, cyber-attacks, online fraud, violent extortion and killings for a fee. In its intelligence notification first published in November 2024 and updated in April 2025, the agency said recent investigations show minors are involved in almost all criminal markets and now appear in more than 70% of them.

That shift matters because Europol describes the recruitment of children not as an isolated abuse but as a deliberate tactic to keep senior criminals insulated from detection, arrest and prosecution. The agency says gangs use young people as low-risk, disposable assets and as a buffer between street-level violence and the network’s core members. Recruitment increasingly relies on targeted language, coded messages and gamification, turning online spaces into a pipeline that normalizes crime and lowers the barriers to entry for children who may be chasing money, status or belonging.

The pattern is already visible in drug trafficking. Europol says minors aged on average between 13 and 17 are being used as street dealers, couriers, warehouse operators and lookout drivers. The agency has warned that the same methods are expanding into broader violence-as-a-service markets, where criminal service providers outsource threats, assaults and killings for a fee. Europol says this model also reaches cybercrime and fraud, making youth recruitment a cross-border public safety problem rather than a single-issue gang warning.

To disrupt that pipeline, Europol launched Operational Taskforce GRIMM on 29 April 2025. The taskforce, led by Sweden, brought together Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom to target violence-as-a-service and the recruitment of young perpetrators. By its one-year mark in 2026, Europol said the operation had led to 280 arrests, including six high-value-target arrests, and identified more than 1,417 individuals linked to these activities and over 14,000 accounts across investigations.

The issue reached Europe’s top police leaders at the 2025 European Police Chiefs Convention in The Hague, where more than 400 police chiefs and senior law enforcement officials from 53 countries and 13 international organisations discussed online recruitment of minors. Europol Executive Director Catherine De Bolle has made protecting children from criminal exploitation one of the agency’s key priorities, as officials warn that violent online communities are grooming and corrupting minors at scale across Europe and beyond.