In an ongoing investigation by the British National Crime Agency (NCA), four more individuals have been arrested in connection to a human smuggling ring that brought hundreds of Albanians into the U.K.

Polish authorities arrested 34 suspected members of an organized crime group that was smuggling and distributing fake medical products, the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) reported on Wednesday.

A U.S. judge sentenced a high-ranking member of the infamous Gambino Crime Family to more than three years in prison and ordered him to pay US$1 million in restitution as well as a $15,000 fine after the mafioso pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, the Department of Justice said.

Brazilian police said they closed an illegal ore processing operation that had been treating cassiterite illegally extracted from indigenous lands in the northern state of Roraima.

 After a sharp increase in 2020, new figures show that piracy in the Gulf of Guinea declined in 2021, particularly after the Royal Danish Navy sailed in to take on the pirates last fall, the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Authority (NIMASA) announced in a statement on Sunday.

Working together, police in seven European countries dismantled the most active Albanian-speaking cocaine smuggling group on the continent, arresting 45 suspected members, Eurojust reported on Tuesday.

An Albanian appeals court sent the country’s former interior minister, Saimir Tahiri, to prison for three years and four month for abusing his office in connection with a drug trafficking network involving two of his relatives.

A group of armed men shot on Sunday at a vehicle, severely injuring the Mayor of San Pedro Tapanatepec and killing two other passengers in the latest attack presumed to have been carried out by organized crime against Mexican officials.

Mexican authorities have arrested two people after the murder of a Mexican journalist who has now become the fifth reporter in a month to be killed most likely over his work in what the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called the deadliest country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere.

Alongside other forms of cybercrime, romance scams have been on the rise since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and have cost Americans more than US$1 billion in 2021 alone, the FBI said in a press release ahead of Valentine’s Day.