They’re not hardened career criminals with decades of violence behind them. In some cases, they’re barely old enough to drive.
Across Europe, law enforcement agencies are tracking a deeply unsettling trend: organised crime networks recruiting teenagers, some as young as 16, to carry out contract killings on behalf of established criminal enterprises. At the centre of it all sits a shadowy outfit known as the Foxtrot Network, believed to be responsible for approximately 35 murders spanning multiple European countries.
The model is chillingly efficient. Rather than maintaining a permanent roster of killers, the network operates what analysts are now calling violence-as-a-service, essentially outsourcing murders the way a business might outsource its IT support. Young recruits are brought in, used for a specific job, and discarded. It keeps the upper tiers of the operation insulated from prosecution.
Why teenagers? The calculus is brutal but logical. Younger perpetrators often receive lighter sentences in European jurisdictions. They’re easier to manipulate, frequently desperate for money, and less likely to have existing criminal records that would flag them to intelligence services. One European prosecutor working on a related case described it as “an industrial approach to violence, where the commodity being traded happens to be human life.”
Payments are reported to range from a few hundred euros up to several thousand, depending on the target and the complexity of the job. For a 17-year-old from a deprived neighbourhood with limited prospects, that kind of money isn’t abstract. It’s rent, food, status.
The recruits are often found through encrypted messaging apps and gaming platforms, spaces where adult safeguarding is patchy at best. By the time authorities identify a pattern, the network has already moved on to the next recruit.
Several EU member states have begun coordinating more closely on cross-border organised crime, but the Foxtrot Network’s deliberately fragmented structure makes it extraordinarily difficult to dismantle. Taking down one cell doesn’t touch the others.
The deeper question isn’t just how you prosecute a 16-year-old who pulled a trigger. It’s what kind of systemic failures, in welfare, in education, in economic opportunity, made him willing to do it in the first place.
