Abstract
This paper describes an approach for detecting the presence or emergence of Organised Crime (OC) signals on Social Media. It shows how words and phrases, used by members of the public in Social Media, can be treated as weak signals of OC, enabling information to be classified according to a taxonomy of OC. Formal Concept Analysis is used to group information sources, according to Crime and Location, thus providing a means of corroboration and creating OC Concepts that can be used to alert police analysts to the possible presence of OC. The analyst is able to ‘drill down’ into an OC Concept of interest, discovering additional information that may be pertinent to the crime. The paper describes the implementation of this approach into a fully-functional prototype software system, incorporating a Social Media Scanning System and a map-based user interface. The approach and system are illustrated using the Trafficking of Human Beings as an example. Real data is used to obtain results that show that weak signals of OC have been detected and corroborated, thus alerting to the possible presence of OC.
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Acknowledgments
This project has received funding from European Union Seventh Framework Pro-gramme FP7/2007 - 2013 under grant agreement n FP7-SEC-2012-312651.
Legal and Ethical Disclaimer. No data that can or may be considered sensitive or personal has been handled as a result of the research undertaken. The authors do however acknowledge, despite being outside of the scope of the research present, that in practice the operational utility of such a system would be dependant on the use of data they may be considered personal and/or sensitive.
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Andrews, S., Brewster, B., Day, T. (2016). Organised Crime and Social Media: Detecting and Corroborating Weak Signals of Human Trafficking Online. In: Haemmerlé, O., Stapleton, G., Faron Zucker, C. (eds) Graph-Based Representation and Reasoning. ICCS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9717. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40985-6_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40985-6_11
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