D-ISN: TRACK 2: Building a Community to Use Intelligence from Online Underground Markets

Illicit commerce, in both conventional markets and online darknet markets, relies on a supply chain in much the same way as licit commerce. The supply chain coordinates the production, sales, information and capital flows that define the markets. However, while extensive research attention has been devoted to understanding the illicit supply chains of drugs, arms, and counterfeit commodities, no previous study has empirically investigated the interactions between different actors on the illicit supply chain of virtual goods, and the flexibility and adaptability of this supply chain to different events like law enforcement interventions, health crises, and rival group’s efforts.

Moreover, although there are strong reasons to believe that virtual goods such as credit cards and individual personal identifiers may play an important role in the production of fake documents, previous research has not paid extensive attention to identification of potential overlap of these two related supply chains. This Disrupting Operations of Illicit Supply Networks (D-ISN) planning grant seeks to leverage the team's documented expertise in the flow of information, banking, data gathering and analysis, and theoretical perspectives drawn from several scientific disciplines (for example, criminology, political science, and economics) to generate a better understanding of the illicit supply chains of virtual goods, counterfeit money and fake documents, the interaction between them, and the junctions in which disruptive efforts should be implemented in effort to dismantle these networks.

This planning project will explore the effectiveness of disruptive strategies in impacting the activities of different actors along the supply chains empirically in the field, and will support the development of machine learning models and tools that support the potential traceability of actors along the two supply chains. Moreover, the project will generate low-cost but powerful tools for academic, industry, and law enforcement agencies to counter the efforts of illicit supply chains of online virtual goods, counterfeit money and fake documents actors.

This project will achieve its goals by building a local research community that includes members of academia, industry, and law enforcement who possess a unique combination of expertise and which will result in effective, ethical, and legal interventions in the criminal markets. The team will first host working group meetings and conferences. Based on the outcomes of these meetings, the team will design and deploy pilot studies to work on the development of appropriate tools for collecting and analyzing data from the field.

Further meetings and workgroup meetings will be used to refine the tools and their implementation. The data collected will allow better understanding the online and offline dimension of the supply chain supporting the underground markets of virtual products (for example credit cards, online identities), counterfeit currency and fraudulent documents.

These efforts should result in empirical evidence, expert insights and solid institutional relationships which could support the development of a future high impact project which is consistent with the D-ISN program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.