The COVID-19 pandemic has created new opportunities for organized criminal groups and confronted them with new challenges. Analysis of how these groups have reacted to the pandemic yields better understanding of how they work and enables the devising of more effective counter-strategies. To this end, we identified illustrative cases regarding the provision of illegal governance and infiltration of the legal economy by conducting a systematic content analysis of international media articles and institutional reports published during the first eight months after the outbreak of the pandemic (January to August 2020). These cases were further analyzed in order to cluster the behavior of criminal groups in response to the COVID-19 emergency, and the means by which they tried to exploit the pandemic to strengthen their political and economic power. We found that different governance-type criminal groups proposed themselves as institutions able to mitigate the burdens imposed by the pandemic by providing support to people in need and enforcing social-distancing measures. Further, identified cases did not provide evidence of groups devoted to the provision of illicit services and goods assuming any governance role. In this respect, the available evidence supports previous knowledge about organized crime. Cases of misappropriation of public funds and organized crime infiltration of the legal economy seem less common, at least in the first phase of the pandemic. The wholesale distribution of pharmaceuticals and medicines has been the sector targeted the most.

COVID-19 大流行为有组织的犯罪集团创造了新的机会，并使他们面临新的挑战。分析这些群体如何应对大流行病，可以更好地了解他们的工作方式，并能够制定更有效的应对策略。为此，我们通过对大流行爆发后头八个月（2020 年 1 月至 2020 年 8 月）发表的国际媒体文章和机构报告进行系统的内容分析，确定了有关提供非法治理和渗透合法经济的说明性案例). 对这些案例进行了进一步分析，以汇总犯罪集团应对 COVID-19 紧急情况的行为，以及他们试图利用这一流行病来增强其政治和经济实力的手段。我们发现，不同治理类型的犯罪集团自称是能够通过向有需要的人提供支持和执行社会隔离措施来减轻大流行带来的负担的机构。此外，已确定的案例没有提供证据表明致力于提供非法服务和商品的团体承担了任何治理角色。在这方面，现有证据支持关于有组织犯罪的先前知识。挪用公款和有组织犯罪渗透合法经济的案件似乎不太常见，至少在大流行的第一阶段是这样。药品的批发分销是目标最多的行业。