AI tools are making cybercrime faster and easier, the head of Interpol’s cybercrime unit told POLITICO.. In an interview on Friday, Neal Jetton, director of cybercrime at Interpol, said a range of AI tools and technology mean it’s now much easier for people without technical expertise to carry out cybercrimes that cost the global economy billions of dollars each year.. The EU puts the global annual price of cybercrime at €5.5 trillion.. Tools include technical infrastructure specifically designed for cybercrime, like so-called “phishing-as-a-service” kits — off-the-shelf tools that allow would-be scammers to create and run phishing campaigns with little or no technical skill — but also widely available commercial tech like AI chatbots.. “What makes it so difficult is that these tools allow pretty much beginners … to actually be able to go and commit fraud at scale,” Jetton said.. The lower barriers to entry mean organized crime groups are increasingly involved in fraud and cybercrime, as they can outsource the technical aspects, in part by using AI tools, Jetton explained. Interpol said in March that AI-enabled fraud is four-and-a-half times more profitable than traditional methods, and that some terrorist groups in Africa are using online scams to fund their activities.. Interpol is part of a new global effort, led by the United Kingdom and involving France, Germany and Italy, to target online scams that are often carried out at large compounds staffed by victims of human trafficking.. AI chatbots enable people working at those scam compounds to create believable, personalized emails or to create deepfakes to commit fraud worth billions, Jetton said.. His comments come as Europe wrestles with how to deal with highly advanced new AI models like Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT‑5.5‑Cyber. The companies behind those tools say they can outperform most human hackers, leading to frenzied government efforts to get access to them and questions about how to regulate them.. Jetton said that at a recent meeting of “very high-ranking CISOs [chief information security officers]” he attended, those tools were “what everybody [was] talking about and focused on.”. Though tools like Mythos are expected to rapidly accelerate how quickly hackers can find and exploit flaws in software, they are not creating new types of crime, Jetton said. “What we’ve seen is that AI has allowed the proliferation, expansion of crime that’s already been existent,” like scams and phishing, he said.. Interpol has 196 member countries, including Russia, China and Iran, which are considered to be Europe’s biggest potential state adversaries. Its cyber unit’s remit does not include combating government-backed activity, and it focuses on assisting national police forces with arrests and building up their own capabilities. Jetton said that police had made some 200 arrests following an EU-funded Interpol operation in the Middle East into cyber scams that concluded earlier this year.
Artificial Intelligence – POLITICO