Organizations like the Yakuza, 'Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra, the Irish Mafia, etc, are part of many countries, to bigger or smaller fashion.

But to someone from those countries, what do you think was the original/historical cause for such organizations to develop?

My country - Portugal - has some degree of presence of these organizations but, to my knowledge, we never developed our domestic version of a crime syndicate. And we are not a bunch of choir boys. Something just kept things from forming. And that intrigues me.

So, what is the understanding of someone from a country where the organizations exist?

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    7·
    19 hours ago

    Organized crime exists everywhere. In the places that don’t have a stereotyped reputation for it, the organized crime groups are either better at hiding or have more control over the local government and don’t get investigated.

    For instance, in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos internet scams are a significant portion of the economy. In Laos the scams revenue represent about 68% of their GDP:

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/02/scam-state-multi-billion-dollar-industry-south-east-asia

    Local governments have tried to crack down on the scam centers, but the operations are so large that basically everyone in the country is either involved directly, or knows someone personally who is.

    “These are massive pieces of infrastructure, set up very publicly. You can go to borders and observe them. You can even walk into some of them,” says Tower. “The fact this is happening in a very public way shows just the extreme level of impunity – and the extent to which states are not only tolerating this, but actually, these criminal actors are becoming state embedded.”

    The point being, most of the time there isn’t a “crime family” like in movies and TV shows. Organized crime is business, and in a lot of places it’s business as usual.