Those illegally sharing files may move on to nastier things, says Andy Archibald.

The head of the National Crime Agency’s (NCA) cybercrime unit has called piracy a "gateway crime" that can lead people onto more serious offences.

Speaking at the Infosecurity Europe conference in London, Andy Archibald warned that illegally downloading copies of films, music and games might cause people to try their hands at other crime online.

In doing so he drew on gateway drug theory, the notion that people who try soft drugs such as cannabis may later graduate to hard drugs because of exposure to drug dealers, changes in brain chemistry or reappraisal of the risks involved.

Following the panel Archibald’s press spokesman attempted to soften the remarks, saying that what they had found was that young people sometimes investigate malware out of curiosity before using it for crime.

Responding to the "gateway crime" remark, Bob Tarzey, a director at research firm Quocirca, told CBR: "I’m not sure I’d agree with that.

"If you can download a bit of music does that mean you’re all of a sudden going to try to become a reseller of pirated material?

"There’s probably some crime you can get into online that would lead you you into something else, but people who do that are probably of that mind anyway."

Archibald’s comments followed his warning that police groups like the NCA are focusing outside of malware developers and engineers who create cyberattacks.

"In a criminal business not only are we interested in those engineers in developing the code and the program," Archibald said. "We’re interested in the bulletproof hosters and we’re interested in those money mules who launder the money, who turn dirty money into legitimate money."

Alan Woodward, a professor from the University of Surrey sitting on the same panel, concurred with Archibald’s view that piracy could be a gateway crime.

However he also said that global organised crime was being enabled by relatively few people, perhaps even as little as 100.

Illegal downloading has been a constant problem for the artistic industries since the advent of the Internet which precipitated a surge in peer-to-peer file sharing that was spearheaded by websites such as Napster.

To share files people typically make us of a torrent, which collects bits of file from users scattered across the globe and assembles it into one functional file.

Last year the final episode of the television show Game of Thrones was illegally downloaded as many as 8 million times via the BitTorrent protocol, according to figures compiled by TorrentFreak, a filesharing blog.

Recent attempts to tackle filesharing in the UK by asking broadband providers to block popular torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay have met with mixed results since such controls can be circumvented.