true crime

The Syrian government have become some of the world’s biggest amphetamine dealers – flooding the Middle East with the drug Captagon to finance their war machine.

“Stealing from the ultra-rich is not a sin,” says the infamous thief Vincenzo Pipino who stole gold, art and jewels worth millions and shared his profits with the poor.

From the Black Axe Gang performing romance scams on lonely singletons to fake crypto hustlers in South Korea, fraud is expanding at an alarming rate.

Who are the Mexican drug cartels? How did they develop? How did the War on Drugs turn them into billion dollar empires, capable of paramilitary style violence?

Amy Carlson leads a group called Love Has Won. While her followers believe she is a divine being, others accuse her of leading a cult.

When three terrorists attacked people in London in 2017, a skateboarder decided to stand in their way and protect the public. His name was Ignacio Echeverría.

The once-feared Japanese mob is on the verge of extinction. Targeted by new laws, rapidly ageing, and unable to find fresh blood, the yakuza has dropped from a height of 180,000 members to less than 30,000.

When a girl was found murdered and abandoned in a tent in the 1960s, no one thought it would take a website being created in 1997 for the case to finally be solved.

Grenades in coffee shops. Rocket launchers fired at offices. The murder of a lawyer representing a gangland informant. Is the Netherlands turning into a narco-state?

When huge quantities of the safrole oil required to make MDMA went up in smoke in the late 2000s, the global ecstasy deficit was filled with a deadly replacement: PMA.

Meet Elliot Casto who as a teenager stole £2.5m through credit card fraud and blasted the lot on Rolex watches, cars, top-end restaurants and five-star hotels.

Following a riot, inmates have taken over an overcrowded prison in Colombia. ‘Boris’ – a Colombian national who grew up in London’s Grenfell Tower – shares his story.