Systemic corruption by entanglement: Illicit financial flows at the intersection of cyber-enabled financial crime, transnational organized crime, and

Overview of the research

This PhD research will examine, through an interdisciplinary crime science and security studies perspective, how factors of systemic corruption facilitate illicit financial flows, such as money laundering and sanctions busting, during the early post-Cullen Commission era in Canada (Cullen, 2022). Within this framework, the project will conduct an end-to-end crime script and network analysis of cyber-enabled financial fraud schemes, such as "pig butchering" - a type of crypto investment social engineering-cum-romance scam (Cross, 2023; Kassem and Carter, 2023).

Pig butchering scam operations are sophisticated, long term, all-in-one crypto asset securities fraud schemes perpetrated by transnational organised crime groups and hostile nation state-sponsored enterprises that have adopted mass telemarketing and platform-as-a-service business models. These schemes rely on professional enablers found within multiple sectors such as third-party corporate services, money services businesses, crypto trading platforms, and web hosting providers of all degrees of knowingness and complicity to commit their illicit activities offshore and multi-jurisdictionally (ACAMS and Homeland Security Investigations, 2022; US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2023; Basel Institute on Governance and EUROPOL, 2022).

This criminal industry is known to exploit human trafficking and money laundering networks often orchestrated within Special Economic Zones across ASEAN countries and leverage guanxi of the global Chinese diaspora to build and violate digital trust (McPherson and Wilson, 2023).

Law enforcement and regulators face an overwhelming problem not only to understand but appropriately combat these crimes that have eroded the financial security of countless Canadians and target the general public from all intersecting identity factors like gender, age, ethnicity, language, and socioeconomic status. According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, annual victim losses are escalating year over year into the hundreds of millions of dollars (Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, 2023).

This research study will strategically argue that pig butchering schemes represent a multibillion-dollar emergent hybrid threat to Canada's national security and economic prosperity and are emblematic of the commodification of foreign interference.