Launched in April 2025, the taskforce set out to tackle the rise of violence-as-a-service where organised crime groups use the worldwide wibble to outsource intimidation, torture and even murder to young and often clueless recruits who are groomed or strong-armed into carrying out attacks.

What started as a nasty Swedish trend has spread across Europe, prompting OTF GRIMM to pull in specialist investigators from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom, along with Europol analysts and online service providers. The aim has been to stop recruitment that mostly plays out on social media platforms and to choke off the murder-for-hire market.

In its first half year, the taskforce fingered the collar of 193 people, which included 63 perpetrators stopped before they could carry out violent acts, 40 enablers who were helping to run violence-for-hire services, 84 recruiters targeting vulnerable young people and six instigators of whom five were classed as high-value targets. Europol said OTF GRIMM has now mapped the major players in the recruitment chain.

Recent cases underline how widely the violence is being commissioned.

On 12 May 2025, an attempted murder in Tamm, Germany, led to the arrests of two suspects aged 26 and 27 in the Netherlands on 1 October 2025.

On 28 March 2025, three people were killed in Oosterhout, the Netherlands, and three suspects were later arrested in Sweden and Germany.

On 1 July 2025, six suspects, including a minor, were arrested in Spain for plotting a murder, which resulted in the seizure of firearms and ammunition.

Europol said the fight against VaaS is far from done as OTF GRIMM turns to disrupting the remaining criminal service providers. The outfit plans to tighten cross-border intelligence sharing and deepen cooperation with tech firms to detect and block recruitment on social media before more young people get dragged into the mess.