As we enter 2026, the Centre for Police Technology (CPT) warns of a profound shift in the global cybercrime landscape: criminal operations are no longer sporadic intrusions but industrialized, AI-driven, and continuously adaptive threats targeting individuals, businesses, and critical infrastructure worldwide. This CPT Predictive Cybercrime Outlook 2026 synthesizes historical trends and emerging patterns to forecast what lies ahead for law enforcement and cyber defenders.
Historic Growth: From Millions to Trillions in Global Impact
Over the past several years, cybercrime has escalated dramatically in both scope and financial impact. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), losses attributed to reported cybercrime in 2024 reached approximately $16.6 billion, a 33% increase over 2023 — even as total complaints slightly declined. Phishing, data extortion, and personal data breaches were the most commonly reported incidents, with seniors disproportionately affected.
Looking further back, reported losses were $12.5 billion in 2023 and over $10 billion in 2022, marking an explosive rise over a relatively short period of time.
Industry forecasts suggest global cybercrime losses could soar into the trillions of dollars annually by the mid-2020s, driven by ransomware, fraud, and breaches tied to cloud, identity, and AI-enabled vectors.
Trend 1 — AI: The New Engine of Cybercrime
According to the CPT, AI will be the central catalyst shaping cybercrime in 2026. AI-driven tools are democratizing capabilities once accessible only to elite attackers:
• AI-powered phishing kits and scam campaigns are projected to rise sharply, automating highly convincing social-engineering attacks tailored to individual victims.
• Deepfake and synthetic identity attacks are expected to grow by over 50% year-over-year, enabling criminals to impersonate leaders, executives, or trusted contacts with alarming realism.
• Malicious AI code-generation and automated vulnerability scanning are expected to increase attackers’ efficiency and reduce the technical barrier to entry for complex exploits.
This surge in AI misuse reflects a fundamental shift: criminal ecosystems now mirror legitimate industrial networks with specialized roles — from initial access brokers to ransomware deployment and money laundering.
Trend 2 — Ransomware and Extortion as Persistent Core Threats
Despite broader diversification of threats, ransomware remains a foundational tool in the cybercriminal playbook. Reports show that ransomware attack complaints continued climbing into 2024 and 2025, with notable growth in publicly disclosed incidents — and ransomware demand and negotiation pipelines becoming more automated and responsive to defensive signals.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) and extortion attacks also rank among the top sources of financial loss, illustrating the effectiveness of social-engineering-augmented fraud in undermining organizational defenses.
Trend 3 — Fractured Attack Surfaces: Identity, Supply Chains, and Automation
In 2026, attackers are projected to target identity systems, automated workflows, and third-party ecosystems more aggressively than ever before, exploiting trust relationships and overlooked permissions rather than traditional software vulnerabilities. Analysts report that deepfake-enabled identity fraud and OAuth token exploitation will climb sharply, while supply chain breaches continue to proliferate.
Smaller organizations — long considered lower-value targets — now constitute nearly half of all attacks, as adversaries leverage scalable tools to cast wider nets.
Trend 4 — Cryptocurrency and Digital Finance as Dual-Use Elements
Digital assets play a growing role in cybercrime economies. In 2024, crypto scams alone accounted for billions in U.S. losses, with Americans losing more than $9 billion to crypto-related fraud. This reflects broader global trends where illicit cryptocurrency movements and decentralized finance (DeFi) opportunism facilitate money laundering and ransom withdrawals.
Law Enforcement Response: Coordination and Predictive Policing
The CPT report stresses that traditional reactive policing models are inadequate for the pace and scale of 2026 cybercrime. Instead, law enforcement agencies must adopt:
• AI-augmented forensic and detection capabilities to match the speed of adversarial automation.
• Real-time intelligence sharing networks among international partners and private sector defenders.
• Predictive analytics frameworks to anticipate emerging threat vectors before they become widespread.
International operations like Interpol’s recent dismantling of major ransomware and BEC networks — resulting in hundreds of arrests and millions of dollars in losses disrupted — demonstrate how cooperation can yield measurable impact.
Outlook: A Technology Arms Race
The CPT concludes that 2026 will be defined not by any single threat, but by the ongoing co-evolution of attack and defense driven by AI. Criminals will integrate automation, synthetic media, and scalable fraud platforms into cohesive operations, while defenders must embrace adaptive, AI-driven cybersecurity strategies to protect digital infrastructure.
In this rapidly escalating environment, proactive intelligence, cross-sector partnerships, and regulatory modernization will be essential to prevent cybercrime from inflicting systemic economic and societal harm on a global scale.
For law enforcement and cybersecurity communities, the challenge has shifted: it’s no longer just fighting breaches — it’s outpacing intelligent threats that learn faster than ever before.
