
How Teens Are Recruited by Criminal Networks
Fifteen-year-old Mike stands accused of shooting a 49-year-old man in Hamburg, and this film reconstructs the case to ask how a teenager ends up pulling the trigger. Reporters talk to Mike's friends and acquaintances, comb through chat histories, and trace a recruitment pattern that repeats across Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden: criminal networks scouting for young, disposable operatives on Telegram and Snapchat, offering quick cash for drug deliveries, beatings, or worse under a model investigators call "Crime as a Service." The film follows similar cases in other cities, showing how the pitch escalates from small errands to serious violence before a teenager understands what he has signed up for. It examines why adolescents are especially easy targets, from social pressure to precarious home lives, and why walking away from these networks once inside is nearly impossible. Interviews with the young people's circles and case documentation ground the reporting, building a picture of organized crime that outsources its most dangerous jobs to kids too young to be tried as adults.