At 16, Swedish MEP Evin Incir (S&D) was on her way to school when a friend called to say a member of their friendship group had been caught in the crossfire of gang violence.
“They said, ‘He’s shot, he’s shot,’ and I didn’t know who. And then she said who it was,” she told The Parliament.
Incir’s experience was an early iteration of a crisis that, decades later, has taken on a far more chilling form. Sweden is now in the grip of escalating gang wars — more ruthless and far-reaching than the country has faced before. Once confined to turf battles on city outskirts, the violence has seeped into daily life, with shootings and bombings occurring almost every week.
Authorities trace the rise to deepening socioeconomic divides and the sense of alienation among marginalised youth. But there is also a new force supercharging the problem: digital recruitment, which Sweden as well as the EU are struggling to contain.
Criminal networks are using social media and encrypted messaging apps to lure young people — some barely in their teens — to carry out murders or bombings for cash, reputation, or simply a sense of belonging.
“This development has continued and become worse and worse,” Incir said. “And with digital platforms, it has accelerated and become much more ruthless, affecting more and more children, and at a younger age.”
As law enforcement scrambles to adapt, policymakers face a new dilemma: how to regulate the very technologies that enable these networks without undermining the privacy rights they were designed to protect.
From turf wars to ‘violence as a service’
Swedish police estimate that around 62,000 people in a country of 10 million are either active in, or connected to, the criminal world.
“We have identified 14,000 as active members of criminal networks,” National Police Commissioner Petra Lundh told reporters last year. Individuals with links to these networks are estimated to add another 48,000.
About 2,000 of these are believed to be leaders. The networks range from motorcycle gangs and loosely organised groups in socially disadvantaged areas, to a growing number of family-based criminal networks.
The drug trade remains the lifeblood of their operations. One such network, Foxtrot — a sprawling, criminal organisation led by Swedish-Kurdish kingpin Rawa Majid, known as “the Kurdish Fox” — is Sweden’s main supplier of narcotics and has grown so powerful it is sanctioned by the US government.
Overall crime in Sweden has declined since 2017, said Victor Dudas, an investigator at Brå, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. “However, the number of children under the age of 15 who are suspects in murder cases has increased.”
That figure has surged fivefold in just two years in an indication of how digital platforms are reshaping recruitment.
“Tech acts as an enabler,” Petra Regeni, a research analyst in the Terrorism and Conflict group at RUSI Europe told The Parliament. “So online, social media, and the tech platforms themselves, act as an accelerator and or an enabler of extremism and violent content.”
A digital playground for organised crime
For Generation Alpha — those born since 2010 — the online world is their natural habitat. “We live in an era where the social media platforms are the modern equivalent of squares and streets,” said Incir.
Globally, there are now some 5.66 billion social media accounts, around two for every three people. Messaging platform Telegram surpassed 1 billion monthly active users in 2025; WhatsApp counts over 3 billion. Signal, the app of choice for many of the European institutions, distinguishes itself by not storing metadata, making its communications almost impossible to trace.
At a joint press conference in August last year, Swedish and Danish justice ministers said encrypted services and social media, naming Telegram and TikTok, are widely used to facilitate crime. But public platforms like Meta and X often serve as entry points.
Recruitment typically begins with an innocuous post — a meme, a music video comment, or a vague offer of “quick work.” Content moderation rules under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) have pushed recruiters to use such coded language on open platforms in order to gauge interest without raising flags, explains RUSI’s Regeni. “They use those interactions to ask, ‘Who are the more susceptible ones?’”
Regeni added that visual culture plays an increasingly strategic role: using violent or gore-coded memes, recruiters can “brand their extremist narratives quite well” and conceal their true intent.
Respondents are then funnelled into larger group chats on platforms such as Telegram, where status and belonging are nurtured.
From there, conversations shift to encrypted channels, where the recruiter issue assignments: deliver a package, act as a lookout, or carry out an attack. The process is designed to obscure the hierarchy. “The layers of this recruitment process enable the instigators to minimise their risk of being caught by law enforcement,” Dudas said.
Recruiters rarely know the instigator personally, and the young recruit is given minimal information. “Anybody with access to these medias or forums can in principle take one of these jobs,” Dudas added.
Europe’s encryption dilemma
EU rules banning terrorist content online are relatively clear. But when it comes to “crime-as-a-service,” regulation falters.
The DSA targets illegal content and unfair market practices. And while it asks Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) to be diligent in their content moderation, it doesn’t reach into encrypted chats and private recruitment, leaving the space largely unregulated.
In addition, there’s no universal classification of "extreme" content — as there is no unanimity on the definition of "extremism" across all member states and platforms. “When you have something that's an opaque ecosystem and an opaque understanding of what is extreme content, what is radical content, it is very difficult for a regulation to do a perfect job in tackling that,” said Regeni.
Law enforcement agencies like Europol have been calling to break encryption to access apps being used for extremist or criminal content. Privacy advocates, however, warn this would set a dangerous precedent — paving the way to mass surveillance.
The debate has gripped Brussels in recent years, often framed around child sexual abuse material (CSAM). But in Sweden, the discussion is refracted through the lens of gang violence. Earlier this year, messaging app Signal considered leaving Sweden after lawmakers proposed a bill allowing police to request message histories of criminal suspects — effectively breaking encryption.
More recently, Denmark, which currently hold the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, pulled back from a proposal allowing online platforms to be served with mandatory CSAM detection orders — including services protected by E2EE.
Meanwhile, earlier this week, the Swedish government unveiled a controversial proposal granting police broader authority to “provoke” and expose serious crimes online. The draft law would allow officers to impersonate minors or drug buyers and, in rare cases, use such tactics against suspects under 15 in investigations of grave offences like preparation for murder.
Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer told reporters the “digitalisation of crime requires new methods” and that police need effective tools to investigate and prosecute the most serious crimes.
While its important to ensure privacy rights, Incir said, “that doesn't mean that we should let our societies be toxified and destroyed in thousand pieces, if not million pieces, through law, letting undemocratic forces, criminal gangs, terrorist organisations use online platforms and our phones at large as a free space to do whatever they want.”
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