Cartels Are Now Also Recruiting Americans To Their Ranks Through Social Media: Report

Different reports across the years have detailed how cartels are using social media to recruit operatives in Mexico. Now, CNN is claiming that the initiative has expanded to the U.S.

The outlet spoke to a woman from Arizona who said she was offered between $5,000 and $10,000 in a single day through a Snapchat message. A 20-year-old single mother, she said the money would help her alleviate financial pressures and accepted to become involved in a human smuggling operation.

The didn't have a car or a driver's license, but got a friend with a vehicle to make the trip to southern Arizona to get the migrants and return north. She received the cash payment that night. Overall, she helped coordinate the smuggling of almost 100 migrants by posting the same social media message herself and finding other people willing to become involved.

The woman detailed that cartels warned her when drivers got arrested and instructed her to delete material from her phone. She never knew the identities of the people she worked for, but experts told the outlet they believe she was working for the Sinaloa Cartel. She was arrested months later and sentenced to prison.

Cartels are increasingly expanding their operations in the digital world. Another study detailed that they are now also using artificial intelligence.

Conducted as part of a program to fight organized crime and financed by the European Union, it determined that the organizations use "smart routing" to also improve their chances of successfully smuggling people to their destinations.

According to Infobae, the tool allows them to avoid checkpoints and determine how long it will take them to conduct an operation. Another passage of the document details that the organizations, including the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, "inflict selective punishments through facial recognition systems."

"By imitating voices or even creating deepfakes, they can elicit emotional responses to conduct blackmail," the report claims.

Another report detailed other activities in social media and cyber security. In a recent interview with specialized outlet InSight Crime, Antonio Nicaso, a professor at Queen's University in Canada and director of the Cybercrime Research Center at Italy's Magna Grecia Foundation, said that experts could be asked to build encrypted communication systems, mine cryptocurrencies, and operate in the dark web.

Moreover, an April investigation by the Mexican military revealed that cybercriminals tied to the CJNG have attempted to infiltrate the networks of security agencies, including the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection, the National Intelligence Center, and state-run oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex).