Overview
Samuel Bloebaum is a senior analyst with Steptoe’s Global Strategic Engagement Team and leads the team’s due diligence investigative work. With a background in geopolitical risk analysis and complex investigations spanning English-speaking countries, Latin America and the Middle East, Sam provides clients with a firm understanding of counterparty risks and compliance red flags. Sam has led projects evaluating multinational supply chain risks, country-specific industry stakeholder analyses and offshore asset tracing.
Sam sat down with Stepwise Editor-in-Chief Anni Coonan, the subject of last week’s entry in Stepwise’s ongoing “Meet the Team” series, to discuss the business impacts of transnational crime and the geopolitical implications of anti-narcotrafficking trends.
For Stepwise, you contribute a section on transnational crime and corruption. Why should law-abiding businesses keep up with developments in foreign criminal activity?
Businesses should be wary of underestimating their exposure to global illicit networks, especially in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world. INTERPOL estimated that internet-enabled scammers stole $442 billion in 2025, while FBI reports estimate that US cybercrime victims lost $20.87 billion in 2025. Recent developments in AI are escalating the threat posed by malign cyber actors, allowing less sophisticated criminals to improve the quality and scope of cyberattacks. The stereotype of the obvious phishing attempt, with misspellings, poor grammar and unprofessional layouts, is a thing of the past. Large language models have allowed scammers to construct emails, text messages and webpages that are close to indistinguishable from legitimate ones. Businesses across diverse industries continue to fortify their cyber defenses and enforce higher standards of diligence from employees targeted by sophisticated phishing attempts.
Beyond cyberattacks, companies doing business in regions with elevated levels of crime and corruption face physical safety risks. Firms attempting to do business in insecure jurisdictions confront higher costs to protect employees from extortion or to prevent physical threats to work sites. Global businesses should also be aware of the growing trend of organized criminals and corrupt law enforcement officials extorting the families of expatriate employees for monetary payments, or to force the expat into becoming an insider threat at their employer. Understanding a jurisdiction’s corruption dynamics will also help a company properly evaluate their risk tolerance for doing business there, as well as the level of competition they may face from rivals willing to engage in corruption.
We have recently seen an increasingly aggressive response to drug traffickers by the US in the Western Hemisphere. What are some other major developments in illicit global trafficking networks that may be falling under the radar?
US military strikes on maritime vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific are the highest-profile recent developments in anti-narcotrafficking efforts, overshadowing major drug enforcement developments in Asia and Europe.
One of the most significant developments outside of North America came out of Afghanistan after the country’s takeover by the Taliban in 2021 and the new government’s ban on opium cultivation. Despite evidence of uneven implementation by Taliban authorities, UN investigators found that global illicit opium production fell by over 70% since this ban came into effect. Afghanistan went from hosting over 82% of the world’s opium poppy cultivation in 2022 to just 14% in 2025. I often joke that the Taliban have legitimately pulled off one of the most effective anti-drug campaigns in world history! The effects of this major disruption to world illicit drug dynamics are still playing out, but, as a consequence of the heroin supply cliff, we are currently seeing a global increase in methamphetamine and synthetic drug production.
As for Europe, it is the primary destination for a global network of increasingly sophisticated and dangerous drug traffickers. The networks connect producers in South America and South Asia to middlemen in North and West Africa and Central Asia to distributors on the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans. You learn a lot about how legitimate global logistics networks work by focusing on how these illicit operations function, complete with underground human resources departments, bespoke financial service providers and 24/7 help centers. To disrupt these traffickers, Europe has, stereotypically, sought to negotiate a multilateral framework. This effort has focused on building a more muscular naval response to maritime trafficking operations centered off the coast of West Africa and nearby Spanish and Portuguese island territories. Legitimate concerns from several European nations about the militarization of anti-crime operations will keep this response from escalating to the level we are seeing from the US, but it is a positive sign that Europe is willing to come up with a stronger anti-trafficking effort.
What are some of the geopolitical consequences of anti-trafficking operations?
Due to the cross-border nature of these narcotrafficking networks, any effective response requires long-lasting multinational cooperation that can be difficult to secure these days. Many countries are understandably sensitive about introducing an anti-crime effort that could highlight reputation-damaging corruption dynamics or result in a violent backlash from criminal organizations unaccustomed to interference in their operations. Corruption dynamics in countries where trafficking networks operate also raise cost-benefit analyses for anti-trafficking efforts. Corrupt political elites can undermine key bilateral security or economic relationships if they feel threatened by apparently unrelated anti-crime efforts.
The US, through its Shield of the Americas initiative, and the EU, through funding for North and West African coast guards and police forces, understand that cultivating reliable government partners is a cost-effective – and effective in general – method for weakening these criminal networks. We will see if the US’ current strategy of boat strikes, narcoterrorism sanctions and kingpin targeting ends up emerging as a viable path to combat narcotraffickers. But I anticipate that it will create long-lasting diplomatic tensions that could end up undermining future anti-crime cooperation.
