Serious and organized crime became more diverse and more harmful in 2025, with drugs, organized immigration crime, and illicit finance all worsening, according to a new report by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA). 

In its National Strategic Assessment 2026, the NCA said our trends were driving the shift: technology’s transformation of organized crime, the convergence and expansion of criminal markets, exploitation of global instability, and intensifying harm to society. The agency concluded that the UK’s overall serious and organized-crime threat increased in 2025 and was highly likely to keep rising over the next 18 months. 

The sharpest deterioration remained in drugs, which the NCA said was the only one of the nine major threat areas where both threat and harm increased. It cited a wider range of substances, lower wholesale prices, rising consumption, growing domestic laboratory activity, and more sophisticated smuggling methods, including alternative European ports and at-sea drop-offs. 

Cocaine seizures in the UK rose to 18.5 tons in 2025 from 3.4 tonnes a decade earlier, while drug-related deaths in England and Wales rose three percent in 2024 to 3,736. 

Illicit finance also increased, the NCA said, as demand for money laundering services rose alongside predicate crimes such as drugs and immigration crime, even though enforcement action disrupted some Russian-speaking laundering networks. Fraud, by contrast, showed no substantial overall change in threat, but the harm caused by the crime grew, with investment fraud losses in the first half of 2025 up 55 percent year-on-year to £97.7 million. 

The NCA said technology was now no longer merely an enabler of serious and organized crime but a driver of large-scale transformation, lowering barriers to entry, expanding access to victims, and helping criminals scale activity across jurisdictions. Social media, encrypted communications, artificial intelligence tools, and online marketplaces were cited as central to that shift, from child sexual abuse and fraud to people smuggling and money laundering. 

Read the National Strategic Assessment 2026 here