I didn't - you are the one that homed in on that. I provided links to articles where it was expressly stated that criminals are early adopters of tech.
You did, but the primary example in the FT link you provided suggests that the mid '90's was early adoption of PCs. That is patently untrue, so I question the subject in that report talking about early adopters of PCs in the mid-'90s timeframe. I'm sure the FT themselves are better versed in PC and computer crime history.
Their other examples are AI and drones. Artificial intelligence as we know it today dates back to the 1950s, the articles you posted suggested what criminals might use it for in the future, but gave no examples of how it has been used in the past or at present. Gartner's Cybersecurity conference last year had a session on AI, again, their focus was solely on how it might be exploited in the future, they had no examples of it being exploited in the wild, the closest they had was an example of machine learning tools beahing human performance on Captchas, but that's a different animal.
Likewise, drones have evolved from the first unmanned aircraft in the 1910s. You'll be hard pressed to find reports of criminal use prior to the mid-2010s when they were first used by the Mexican cartels to transport drugs across the border. The first reported use there was 8 years after the licensing of commercial drones in the US, and 4 years after Parrot released the AR drone to the mass market. Apart from the cartels with their massive resources, pretty much all other criminal use of drones I see reported makes use of mass-produced consumer drones.
It also mentions synthetic biology, but I'm no biologist.
