Crime Goes Digital Native Audio Brief

(0:00) Introduction: Technology’s Role in Modern Security

Welcome to Cognyte Audio Briefs, where we unpack what’s happening around the world and the forces shaping today’s security landscape. Each episode explores how technology can help law enforcement, intelligence, and military agencies turn complex data into clarity, insight, and decisive action.

(0:26) The Death of the Physical Crime Scene: Entering the Digital Wild West

Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we are looking at, well, a massive shift in public safety because the crime scene, it’s not in the physical world anymore. Not at all.

You know, I was walking down the street the other night and I saw a police car, lights on, parked outside a convenience store. And my immediate thought was, you know, okay, a robbery, maybe a shoplifter. This very physical idea of what crime looks like.

It’s tangible, right? You can see the broken glass, the yellow tape. It makes sense to our brains.

It’s comforting in a way. Exactly. But looking at the research we’ve pulled for today’s Deep Dive, that mental image feels almost nostalgic.

It really does. We’re in the middle of a full migration. We’re leaving the physical world behind and stepping into, well, a digital wild west.

And I don’t think you’re using that term lightly. When you say crime scene now, we shouldn’t be picturing an alleyway. No, not at all.

You should be picturing a server farm or, more likely, a teenager’s bedroom lit up by an iPad at two in the morning. And the stakes here, based on these reports, are just terrifyingly high. This isn’t just about stolen credit card numbers anymore.

No, credit card theft is almost quaint now. We’re talking about digital avatars getting mugged for assets worth real money. We’re talking crypto wallets drained of life savings in seconds.

And the part that really keeps law enforcement awake at night. The evidence.

(1:50) Generational Shift: Understanding Gen Z, Alpha, and Beta

Fingerprints, witnesses, CCTV. It’s all just disappearing into the cloud. You can’t dust a server for prints, you know.

And that is exactly our mission for this Deep Dive. We’re going to unpack how these digital native generations, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and even the incoming Gen Beta, are fundamentally changing the very nature of crime. And the core conflict we’re seeing in all the data is this clash of operating systems.

You have analogue policing. Right. Institutions built on city limits and physical borders.

Exactly. And they’re trying to catch up with a digital ecosystem that is borderless, instantaneous, and almost totally anonymous. Okay.

So before we dive deep, let’s just quickly define who we’re talking about. Gen Z, Alpha, Beta. They get thrown around a lot.

They do. But the distinctions are vital. So Gen Z, born roughly 1995 to 2009, they’re the true digital natives.

They don’t remember a world before the internet. Not really.

Then you have Gen Alpha, born 2010 to 2024.

Those are the kids and teens right now. And then the one that sounds like a software update, Gen Beta. It does, doesn’t it?

They start arriving in 2025. And if you think Gen Z is glued to their screens, well, Gen Beta will be integrated with their tech on a whole other level. But why does the generation matter so much?

Why not just call it all cybercrime and be done with it? Because it’s about the mindset. For us, maybe the internet is a place we go, we log on, we log off.

It’s a tool. It’s a tool. For these generations, it’s not a destination.

It’s their default operating system. And that forces a complete rethink of policing. If your entire life lives on a device, your vulnerabilities are just different.

Let’s talk about the scale of this, because the numbers in our notes are pretty staggering. They are. This isn’t a niche issue.

Gen Z is already about 30% of the global population. And Gen Alpha, that’s over 2 billion children right now. By 2035, there’ll be almost a quarter of everyone on Earth.

So in a decade, the vast majority of all activity, finance, communication, you name it, is going to be governed by this digital-first mindset. That’s the new global standard we’re looking at. Okay, so let’s dig into that mindset.

The sources mention this idea of the security perimeter basically vanishing. What is that? Well, think about the shift from a phone being a device of convenience to a device of identity.

For older generations, a phone is a tool. For these younger groups, it’s an extension of themselves. The data says 65% of Gen Z and millennials communicate more online than in person.

And here’s the stat that got me. 62% would rather forget their wallet than their phone. I mean, I hate to admit it, but I’m probably in that group.

If I lose my wallet, it’s an annoyance. Right. You cancel some cards.

But if I lose my phone, I feel like I’ve lost my brain, my bank, my maps, my contacts. Everything’s on there. It’s an existential crisis.

It is. But there’s a specific behaviour tied to this that the research shows is a huge problem for law enforcement. The death of the phone call.

Oh, this is so real. Nearly 70% of young adults prefer texting. And a full quarter of them just never answer the phone.

If it rings, they stare at it like it’s a bomb. They just assume it’s a scam or bad news. I do that. If you call me out of the blue, I assume there’s an emergency.

(5:10) The Privacy Paradox: Identity, Connectivity, and Low-Friction Vulnerabilities

But why does that matter for crime? Because it shows an aversion to what we’d call low speed, high verification methods.

Okay, like talking to a bank teller, showing an ID. Exactly. Or answering a call from the fraud department.

If your population refuses to engage in those high friction interactions, you create a low friction environment. And criminals thrive on low friction. It’s like leaving the front door unlocked because finding the key takes too long.

Precisely. Speed is valued over verification. And that’s the vulnerability.

Let’s break those vulnerabilities down by generation, starting with Gen Z. You’d think they’d be smarter about security. It’s a paradox.

The research calls it the privacy paradox. They think they’re being private. They’re using encrypted chats, vanish mode.

Right. They’re very secretive about their one on one conversations. But at the same time, they overshare like crazy in huge group chats or on public feeds.

So they lock the front door, but live stream the layout of the house. That’s a perfect analogy. And that oversharing creates massive vectors for social engineering.

If I know your pet’s name from a TikTok trend, I can try to reset your passwords.

(7:35) AI Natives and Virtual Economies: Risks for Gen Alpha and Gen Beta

OK, what about Gen Alpha? The current kids?

The sources are calling them AI natives. Yeah, they’re the first truly AI immersed generation. Almost half of them use AI tools daily.

But the bigger risk right now is the virtual economy. Meaning gaming. Massive gaming ecosystems.

94% of them are game enthusiasts. Think about Roblox. It’s huge.

110 million daily users and two thirds of them are under 16. In those worlds, their assets are digital skins, items, currency, but they have real world monetary value. So a kid losing their sword could be like losing 50 or 100 real dollars.

Or 500 or more. And they’re 10 year olds holding these valuable assets in a largely unregulated market. And looking ahead to Gen Beta, the sources talk about ambient intelligence.

That sounds like sci-fi. It does. But it means that for them, AI won’t be a tool you open, it’ll be a constant presence.

Think AR glasses, AI co-pilots, smart homes that anticipate your needs. The fridge knows you add a milk before you do. Right.

And if the tech anticipates your needs, it has to know everything about you. Your schedule, your health, your habits. That data is a goldmine for criminals.

OK, so let’s get into the new face of crime. What are the actual trends hitting these groups? It starts with what we call low verification fraud.

High volume, peer-to-peer scams on Cash App, Zelle, Venmo, fake tickets on social media marketplaces. Fast, easy, and once the money is sent, it’s gone. There’s no undo button.

(9:00) The New Face of Fraud: From Pig Butchering to AI Deepfakes

Then you have something much darker. The term in the notes is pig butchering. That’s such a brutal name.

What is it? It is a brutal term for a brutal crime. It’s a long con crypto scam.

The criminal doesn’t just grab your money and run. They build a relationship with the victim, sometimes over months. It’s psychological manipulation.

Deeply. They build trust, maybe on a dating app. They’ll show you small returns on an investment to prove it’s real, let you withdraw a little money.

Fattening the pig. Exactly. And once the victim has poured their life savings in, the criminal vanishes.

It’s devastating. And now AI is making this scalable. AI is an accelerant.

We’re seeing deepfakes used to impersonate family members. Mom, I’m in jail. Send money.

But now it’s a video call with your child’s face and voice. That’s terrifying because seeing is believing. And this intersects with Gen Z and crypto in a really dangerous way.

Over half of Gen Z have owned crypto. But get this, 67% of their traders use AI bots for trades. They trust the algorithm more than a human broker.

They trust the code more than institutions. So when something goes wrong, there’s no bank to call, there’s no 1-800 number. They go online for help and often find more scammers.

More scammers waiting to victimise them a second time. This theme of trust, or maybe misplaced trust, keeps coming up. The sources say one in three Americans under 30 now get their news from influencers.

Right. They trust peers over institutions. And the algorithms reward provocative content.

Which leads to real world consequences. Absolutely. We see flash trends of mass swatting calls, fake bomb scares, even hate crimes, all driven by viral disinformation that spills out from the screen into the street.

Can you explain swatting? Because it’s more than just a prank. It’s weaponized harassment.

You make a hoax call to 911 claiming a murder, a hostage situation, to send a massive armed police response to a victim’s home. You’re using the police as a weapon. And people have died from this.

Yes. And then there’s sextortion, which is maybe the most psychologically damaging. This is where they use AI to create fake images.

Deepfake AI, yeah. They create compromising sexual images of someone that are completely fabricated and then threaten to release them unless they’re paid. The crime is entirely digital, but the psychological harm is devastatingly real.

So you have this tidal wave of digital crime. And on the other side, analogue policing. And the sources are blunt.

It’s failing. Why? It’s not just a lack of hardware.

It’s the physics of it. So if a crime is borderless, what happens to evidence? It vanishes.

That’s challenge number one. Pace. The window to collect data is sometimes less than 24 hours.

By the time a warrant is signed, the data is gone. And then there’s this idea of gamified scams, which is so insidious. It is.
Criminals, maybe posing as popular gamers, lure teens into moving virtual currency. Hey, can you just transfer this gold for me? The teen thinks they’re helping a friend.

But they’re actually laundering money. They’ve become unwitting money mules in a transnational criminal chain. Which brings us to the jurisdiction nightmare.

(11:20) Weaponized Harassment: The Rise of Swatting and Sextortion

Challenge three. The classic scenario. Perpetrator in Eastern Europe, platform based in the US, victim in Australia.

How do you even begin to police that? It’s nearly impossible. Crime moves at the speed of light, but bureaucracy moves at the speed of international treaties.

The trail is cold before the paperwork is even filed. And the criminals are completely anonymous. They’re using pseudonyms, avatars, decentralised apps, where there’s no central server to subpoena.

You can’t just call up the bank of crypto. It doesn’t exist. Plus, the internet of things is just making the attack surface bigger.

Smart toys, wearables. We’re putting internet connected listening devices in our kids’ bedrooms. There have been actual cases of strangers talking to children through a hacked smart teddy bear.

(11:35)The Path Forward: OSINT, Blockchain Analytics, and the Human Firewall

OK, this is all incredibly grim, but let’s talk solutions. What is the path forward? The sources point to three main responses.

First one is tools, advanced tools. More than just a digital magnifying glass, I take it. A lot more.

We’re talking OSINT open source intelligence. It’s about using publicly available data to trace bad actors and advanced blockchain analytics that can connect a wallet address to a real world identity, even through mixers. And these decision intelligence platforms.

That’s about data fusion. Imagine a system that can connect a burner phone number to a crypto wallet to a metaverse avatar and show it to an investigator as one single picture. It connects the dots a human would miss.

So using tech to catch up to tech. You have to. Second response is cultural.

Who is actually doing the policing? It can’t just be the cyber unit in the basement anymore. Exactly.

Every officer needs to understand what a crypto wallet is, what Discord is. So when a victim comes in saying their NFT was stolen, the officer doesn’t say, what’s an NFT? Right, because that just shuts the victim down.

Yeah. Okay. And finally, communication.

You have to meet them where they are. Europol and Intrapol have this Think Twice campaign. You can’t use billboards.

You have to be on TikTok, on Instagram. Promoting that pause and verify behaviour. It’s about building a human firewall, getting people to just slow down for a second before they click.

If you stop the click, you stop the crime.

(12:57)Conclusion: Evolve or Become Irrelevant

So to wrap this up, what’s the headline takeaway from our deep dive today? The headline is that law enforcement has to evolve its tools and its mindset or it risks becoming irrelevant.

As always, thank you for listening to the deep dive. Stay curious, stay safe, and maybe check your privacy settings. Indeed.

Think twice. See you next time.