Organised crime in Victoria is not the romanticised picture you get from a Netflix series. It is a working economy — drug importation, distribution, money laundering, debt collection by force, fraud, and the violence that flows from disputes over any of those things. Most Victorians never see it directly. They see its effects in shootings, in arson attacks on tobacco stores, in seizures at the docks and in the occasional headline about a gangland funeral.
This is our plain-English guide to who the main players are, how Victoria Police pushes back, and what the legal toolkit looks like in 2026.
Outlaw motorcycle gangs
The most visible component of organised crime in Victoria is the outlaw motorcycle gang scene. Five clubs are well documented as operating chapters in the state: the Mongols, the Hells Angels, the Bandidos, the Comanchero and the Rebels. They are not all equal, and the membership tide moves between them. Patches change. Chapters split. Members are expelled and patched up elsewhere. What stays consistent is that these clubs operate as criminal enterprises in addition to whatever lawful or social activity they advertise — that is the formal Victoria Police position, and it is consistent with findings of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.
The activities most commonly attributed to OMCG-affiliated offenders in Victoria are methamphetamine and cocaine distribution at the wholesale and mid-tier levels, extortion, intimidation, firearms offences and increasingly investment in legitimate-looking businesses for laundering purposes. Public OMCG conflict in Victoria has driven a long run of shootings and arson attacks, and shifts in alliances between Sydney and Melbourne chapters have repeatedly spilled into Victorian streets.
Ethnic-based and family-based syndicates
Alongside the OMCGs, Victoria has a cohort of organised crime groups that are organised along ethnic or family lines rather than club affiliation. Our newsroom does not name specific communities here, partly because the picture is fluid and partly because Victoria’s population is not well served by lazy ethnic labelling. Victoria Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission both refer to these groups in their public reporting, generally describing them by primary criminal activity rather than ethnicity.
What we can say without contention is this: a substantial share of large-scale drug importation cases prosecuted in Victoria over the past decade have involved syndicates organised through family or community networks rather than through OMCGs. That structure makes them harder to penetrate using traditional informant-led techniques, because the trust circles are tight and the personal cost of cooperation is high.
Street-level methamphetamine and cocaine networks
Below the wholesalers sit the street-level networks that actually move product to users. These networks are less centralised, more transient, and more visible to local police. They are also where most of the violence that affects ordinary Victorians plays out — turf disputes, debt enforcement, and the chaotic offending that comes with heavy methamphetamine use.
Cocaine has shifted in Melbourne over the past five years. It is no longer the niche product it was. The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s wastewater monitoring program has shown sustained year-on-year increases in cocaine consumption in Melbourne, and the seizure data from the Australian Border Force is consistent with that. Methamphetamine remains the larger market by weight and the larger driver of harm by every measure that matters — hospital presentations, family-violence callouts, custodial sentences.
The Echo Taskforce and the Anti-Gangs Squad
Victoria Police runs a number of dedicated units in this space. The two most relevant for organised crime are Taskforce Echo and the Anti-Gangs Squad.
Taskforce Echo is the long-running Victoria Police unit dedicated to outlaw motorcycle gangs. Its remit covers the OMCG environment specifically — intelligence gathering, disruption, and prosecution of patched members and prospects. It works closely with the Australian Federal Police and with equivalent units in New South Wales and Queensland, because OMCG networks do not respect state borders.
The Anti-Gangs Squad sits in the broader Crime Command and works on serious organised crime more generally, including syndicates that are not OMCG-aligned. It runs proactive investigations rather than waiting for incidents to be reported, and a significant share of its output is in the form of large coordinated arrest days targeting an entire syndicate at once.
These units do not operate alone. The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Border Force and AUSTRAC all feed into Victorian organised crime work, and the Joint Organised Crime Taskforces (JOCTFs) that operate in each state are how that information sharing is formalised.
The Criminal Organisations Control Act 2012
The legislative centrepiece in Victoria is the Criminal Organisations Control Act 2012 (Vic). The Act gives the Supreme Court power, on application by the Chief Commissioner of Police, to declare an organisation a ‘declared organisation’ if it is satisfied that members associate for the purpose of organising, planning, supporting or engaging in serious criminal activity, and that the organisation poses a serious threat to public safety.
Once an organisation is declared, the court can make control orders against its members. Control orders restrict who a member can associate with, where they can go, and what they can possess. Breach of a control order is a criminal offence carrying a substantial maximum penalty.
The Act has been used sparingly compared to its New South Wales and Queensland equivalents, partly because the threshold for a declaration is high and partly because Victoria has tended to rely more heavily on prosecution-based disruption than on civil-style declaration regimes. Whether that is the right balance is a matter on which reasonable people disagree, and there is ongoing academic and legal debate about the constitutional limits of consorting and association laws across Australia.
Unexplained wealth provisions
The other significant legal lever is unexplained wealth. Victoria has provisions in the Confiscation Act 1997 (Vic) that allow the state to seek orders requiring a person to demonstrate that their wealth was lawfully acquired. If they cannot, the wealth can be forfeited to the state. Unlike traditional criminal forfeiture, an unexplained wealth order does not require a criminal conviction — the test is civil, on the balance of probabilities, and the burden shifts to the respondent to account for the assets in question.
This is, by design, a powerful tool. It is also a controversial one, because it cuts against the ordinary common-law position that the state must prove its case. The provisions have survived repeated constitutional challenge, and they have been used in Victoria against a range of organised crime targets including senior OMCG figures. Recovered funds flow into a confiscated assets account and are reinvested into law enforcement, victim support and crime-prevention programs.
What the picture looks like in 2026
The honest summary is that organised crime in Victoria is not winning, but it is not losing either. Seizures are up. Successful prosecutions are up. Wastewater data shows that drug consumption has stayed broadly flat or has grown for some substances. The economic incentive to keep importing and distributing has not gone away, and as long as that incentive exists, new entrants will move into the gaps left by every disruption. That is the nature of a market.
What our newsroom watches for is whether the violence stays contained to the people inside the trade or whether it spills into ordinary streets. The most concerning recent pattern across Australian states has been arson attacks on retail tobacco premises connected to extortion disputes. Victoria has had a share of those, and the response from Victoria Police and from the Department of Justice and Community Safety has been a focus area through 2025 and 2026.
If you have information about organised crime, you can report it confidentially to Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or online at the Crime Stoppers Victoria website. In an emergency call 000. If you are under threat or being intimidated, contact your local police station or call the Police Assistance Line on 131 444.
