Drugs, trafficking, and dirty money go digital: What organized crime looks like in Czechia now

According to the country's top organized crime investigators, the modern Czech criminal is an analyst, an investor, and increasingly, a service provider.

The National Centre Against Organized Crime (NCOZ) released its annual report on Thursday, and the picture it paints is of an underworld that has professionalized.

Gone are the hierarchical gangs of the 1990s and the clientelistic "tennis buddy" corruption networks that followed them, the report says.

In their place: specialized criminal organizations operating across borders, hiding behind encrypted platforms, and offering their capabilities, money laundering, cyberattacks, forged documents, to whoever can pay.

"The modern criminal is no longer a murderer in a balaclava and leather jacket," said NCOZ chief Jiří Mazánek. "He is an analyst and investor who uses AI to deceive you and invests his profits in luxury apartments before the state apparatus has time to react."

The shift is perhaps most visible in the drug trade. The National Anti-Drug Centre (NPC), which released its own annual report the same day, found that street sales are declining sharply as distribution moves to encrypted apps, courier deliveries, and pre-arranged dead drops. Payments in cryptocurrency make both buyers and sellers harder to trace.

The market is also changing in terms of what is being sold. Clephedrone, a synthetic stimulant cheaper than cocaine or methamphetamine and more toxic than either, has overtaken meth as the dominant seized substance.

Police confiscated 953 kilos of it last year, with a street value of nearly CZK 286 million, out of a total CZK 438 million in seized drugs, roughly CZK 37 million more than the previous year.

The rise of clephedrone and mephedrone is being driven by an organized international supply chain.

Foreign groups provide the technology and raw materials; local operators rent industrial premises, manufacture large quantities in a short window, and move on, leaving behind significant amounts of hazardous chemical waste that can contaminate soil and groundwater.

One particular risk flagged by investigators: clephedrone and mephedrone are increasingly being sold as counterfeit ecstasy. Users frequently have no idea they have taken a different substance. Given the higher toxicity, the NPC describes this as extremely dangerous.

Synthetic cannabinoids present a separate concern. Often sold as sweets or vape refills (and sometimes produced using CBD as a precursor) they have caused waves of intoxications and are being deliberately marketed to children and adolescents.

Meanwhile, synthetic opioids including nitazene and fentanyl are appearing as heroin availability declines. Czech police recorded two fatal overdoses linked to such substances last year, both involving drugs ordered from abroad. The lethal dose, the NPC noted, can be measured in thousandths of a gram.

The NCOZ report introduces a concept that dominated its casework last year: Crime-as-a-service. Criminal organizations no longer operate as closed hierarchies. Instead, they function as specialist providers, offering specific capabilities including document forgery, money laundering infrastructure, hired cyberattacks, to other criminal groups on demand.

Cybercrime, the report notes, no longer sits in its own category. It now runs through virtually every form of organized crime. Perpetrators routinely switch between encrypted platforms and use cryptocurrency tumblers to obscure financial flows.

Criminal networks are moving millions of crowns daily, in cash and digital assets, beyond the reach of existing regulation.

Violence, while declining overall, has not disappeared. The NCOZ warns it may re-emerge as a service in its own right, deployed specifically in economic disputes to seize profits.

One of the more detailed sections of the NCOZ report concerns the trafficking of women from Asia and Latin America into the Czech Republic and wider Schengen Area for sexual exploitation.

The pattern is consistent: women enter on tourist visas, cycle between countries every 90 days to appear new to local markets, and are controlled through debt, charged for flights, accommodation, and paperwork.

Some are aware before leaving their home countries that they are travelling to provide sexual services; others are told they will work as waitresses or models.

The NCOZ notes a particular challenge in prosecuting these cases: the women have deep distrust of police, shaped by negative experiences in their countries of origin, and often fear they themselves are committing a crime.

Last April, three members of an international network trafficking Vietnamese women into Germany were arrested; the group operated across Vietnam, Germany, Poland, and Lithuania.

Mazánek used stronger language on what he termed "modern slavery," a category that includes not only trafficking but the exploitation of vulnerable Czech workers by domestic operators using debt bondage and administrative control. The number of such cases is rising.

The report's most pointed warnings concern money laundering and what Mazánek calls "toxic capital."

Post-Soviet criminal networks are actively investing in Czech real estate, the NCOZ says, taking advantage of what it describes as weak oversight of ownership transparency and compliance obligations.

Russian aggression in Ukraine has added another layer: cases involving violations of international sanctions (such as the export of mining machinery to Russia through intermediaries) rose significantly last year.

"The combination of potential anonymity of ownership, weak oversight of compliance with administrative obligations, and the influx of Russian-speaking and Ukrainian criminal groups creates an environment where dirty capital feels safe," Mazánek said.

The NCOZ chief is calling for legislative reform to allow authorities to pursue criminal capital faster, before it can be converted into anonymous assets or property. The police, he argues, must specialize, infiltrate criminal networks more deeply, and develop expertise that keeps pace with the criminals themselves.

Czech police seized assets worth CZK 7.23 billion in criminal proceedings last year, up CZK 1.47 billion on 2024. The NCOZ alone accounted for CZK 3.92 billion of that.

Virtual asset seizures surged the most dramatically, from CZK 43 million in 2024 to CZK 1.3 billion last year, driven in part by the investigation of Tomáš Jiřikovský, charged with laundering around CZK 1 billion in bitcoin previously donated to the Ministry of Justice.

The NPC accused 3,194 people of drug offenses, 115 fewer than in 2024, with Prague handling the highest caseload. The NCOZ launched its "Work in Chains" campaign targeting human trafficking.

But the numbers also illustrate the scale of what is escaping. Criminals are moving away from traceable cryptocurrencies toward NFTs and other digital assets specifically to inflate valuations and obscure the origin of funds.

Investment scams are also ogrowing more sophisticated. The NCOZ flags a rise in long-term "pig-butchering" schemes, in which perpetrators build trust with victims over months before directing them to fake platforms and extracting large sums, laundered through complex transaction chains.

Corruption, meanwhile, continues through clientelistic networks, with the highest-risk procurement remaining in construction, healthcare, and IT. The NCOZ says it is actively monitoring attempts to infiltrate decision-making centers where large sums are distributed.

The question of whether legislation can keep pace with an organized crime landscape that, as Mazánek put it, can move millions "in a matter of digital seconds," remains.