West Africa has become a hotspot for pharmaceutical trafficking, according to a Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crimereport, with up to 80% of Burkina Faso and Guinea’s medical products in particular believed to have been smuggled in by criminals.

As a consequence of illegal trafficking, several great ape species now find themselves in decline and past the threshold of being critically endangered, according to a Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC)report.

Targeted killings and professional hitmen are in high demand in South Africa, according to a Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) report, which examines how violence has festered as a monetizable commodity over the past two decades.

Though they once boasted one of the world’s most robust environments for organized crime since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the criminal ecosystem in Russia and Ukraine has fractured since Russian president Vladimir Putin’s launched his invasion one year ago, according to anew report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).

Taking a page out of the financial crime enforcements handbook, researchers at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime have now started using anew tool to fight wildlife trafficking.

Illicit economies, most notably arms trafficking, cattle rustling and kidnapping for ransom, are a major factor behind West Africa’s growing instability – says a new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime and Corruption (GI-TOC).

Criminal activities of jihadists in Burkina Faso are not primarily motivated by profit but by their ambition to earn legitimacy in the areas they are trying to govern – according to a newreport by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).

Guinea-Bissau continues to serve as a key cocaine transit point between Latin America and Europe, despite government pledges to clamp down on smuggling – says a new report by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) published in July.

Commercial seaports in South-eastern Europe (SEE) are nodes for cocaine and heroin smuggling and illicit trade. Drug shipments, mainly from Latin America, are frequently found in fresh fruit containers - specifically bananas, says a new report looking at the maritime Balkan routes.

Products derived from pangolins, whose populations around the world have been brought to the brink of extinction by relentless poaching, are widely advertised on open web platforms – says a new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC).

Since they first separated from Ukraine in 2014, a nexus of crime, corruption and rebellion has flourished in the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’ (DNR and LNR) as well as Russian occupied Crimea, a new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) found.

The West African nation of Liberia is entering a period of accelerating vulnerability, threatening to create conditions for a resurgence of organized crime – according to a new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).

The Sahel, the arid plains of North Africa wedged between the Sahara desert and the dense jungles farther south, has long been a lucrative highway for people smugglers who shuttle millions of migrants through Niger and into Algeria or Libya on their way to Europe, in what were often harrowing journeys.

South Africa, the world’s largest chrome producer, loses around 10% of its annual production to illegal mining which has served to empower mining mafias, according to abulletin of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) published last week.

Despite charges of illicitly trafficking over 30 tonnes of ivory for over a decade now, the alleged members of one of Africa’s largest wildlife-trafficking networks have by and large managed to evade conviction, according to arisk bulletin compiled by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).

For almost a decade now, South Africa’s construction sector has had to contend with organized crime groups that extort construction sites for moneyor a stake in development projects, and are not adverse to threatening those who oppose them with violence or death, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC)reported Tuesday.

The latest commodity being trafficked out of Southeast Asia and on to lucrative markets in China is neither wildlife nor drugs or arms but rather brides, according to a new reportby the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).

Organized criminals in the western Balkans and particularly Albania are increasingly using the United Arab Emirates as a safe haven to hide both themselves and their money from law enforcement, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) found in a new analysis.

Blocked from international financial and gold markets following its invasion of Ukraine, Russia could use its influence in West Africa to exploit illicit gold markets and gold laundering to generate profits and move finances across borders, said a new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC.)

For decades, law enforcement has been neglecting the illegal trade and sale of protected wildlife online, leaving it up to civil society to fight the problem, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) said in a recent report.