Children are being recruited as criminals at an 'industrial scale': Europol

“This is spreading like wildfire,” a top European law enforcement official said.

Early on a Sunday evening last year, Anneli Berg said "see you later!" to her 16-year-old son Rio as he headed out to the gym with his friends. She expected him to arrive back at their home in Stockholm, Sweden in just a couple of hours.

Just after 9 o’clock that night in March 2025, a hooded stranger emerged from the dark, came up behind the group that had just left the gym, pulled a gun and opened fire. One teen was shot in the thigh. Rio was killed.

“It’s still hard to believe. Sometimes I feel like I’m dreaming, like a nightmare,” Berg said in an interview with ABC News. “Why him? Why his friends? Is there something that I don't know?”

There was nothing more to know, the detectives told Berg. Rio "was just at the wrong place at the wrong time," she said.

Swedish investigators said the shooter was no professional assassin – but another teenage boy who had been recruited to kill.

Top law enforcement officials in Western Europe said Rio’s death is part of a growing and terrifying trend of kids being recruited and groomed online by criminal gangs to commit heinous acts.

“It's like a cheap build-your-own contract killer scheme,” Catherine De Bolle, who until last month was executive director of Europol, the European Union’s police agency, told ABC News.

And the problem of violence as a service, she said, is occurring on an "industrial scale."

“Now, with the usage of artificial intelligence, with the new technology, and with the fact that so many youngsters are on digital platforms, it's heaven for criminal networks,” De Bolle said. “This is really worrying us.”

For six months, ABC News has been investigating the rise of what officials call "violence as a service." Police are now investigating cases like this across Western Europe and, officials in the U.S. said, they know the problem is moving across the ocean.

“Criminal gangs across the board have fully embraced the power of the internet” to commit their crimes, said John Cohen, former head of intelligence for the Department of Homeland Security.

“It is happening here,” said Cohen, an ABC News contributor and an expert on online radicalization and crime. “This is the reality of today.”

Officials say it is simply a computer-age twist on how criminal organizations find unsuspecting teens to do their dirty work: they lurk on gaming sites and messaging apps, seeking to recruit kids as young as 13. The result is child foot soldiers hired as hitmen, becoming both the perpetrators of crime and the victims of criminals.