The distributed crime network

By Marc Goodman

Crowdsourcing began as a legitimate tool to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to solve complex business and scientific challenges. Unfortunately, these very same techniques are increasingly being adopted by the criminal underground for nefarious purposes.

The concept of crowdsourcing first gained widespread attention in an article written in 2006 by Jeff Howe for Wired Magazine. Howe defined crowdsourcing as the act of outsourcing a task to a large, undefined group of people through an open call.

The increasing application of crowdsourcing is changing “business as usual” in a wide variety of industries. In a noted example, Don Tapscott, in his book Wikinomics, described how one Canadian gold mining company facing a looming shutdown desperately turned to the general public to help solve a critical business problem. The company, Goldcorp, was so frustrated with the inability of its own geologists to locate any gold that it did something unheard of at the time: it offered $500,000 to anyone who could find and map the location of the company’s own gold in its own mines. To facilitate the effort, Goldcorp posted their full datasets online. After receiving submissions from more than a thousand people in 50 different countries, Goldcorp achieved the success that had so eluded the firm previously. A member of the public used Goldcorp’s data to make an incredible discovery and to locate more than $3 billion worth of gold using techniques never previously employed in the mining industry.

While numerous productive examples of crowdsourcing such as the Goldcorp case have been documented over time, these very same techniques increasingly are being exploited for criminal purposes as well.

Crime and the crowd

The growing popularity of crowdsourcing has not gone unnoticed, either, by international organized crime groups and local neighborhood thugs, each of which is quickly updating its tactics to drive operational efficiencies. Welcome to the world of “crime-sourcing.” Borrowing from Howe’s concept, crime-sourcing can be defined as the act of taking the whole or part of a criminal act and outsourcing it to a crowd of either witting or unwitting individuals.

The growth in crime-sourcing is shaking up long-standing business models and traditions within the criminal underground and is leading to innovations in crime. For example, all organized crime groups have historically looked upon outsiders with great suspicion: don’t trust somebody you don’t know and who has not been vetted. Elaborate processes were established, such as the Mafia’s Omertà, to ensure newcomers to the criminal enterprise were neither rats nor cops. It would often take years of robberies, loan sharking and murder to gain the trust and confidence of the “boss.”

The distributed crime network

As the world turned to globalization, so too did organized crime. Their initial attempts were limited, but generally effective. Drug cartels in Latin American began to work with organized crime groups in Eastern Europe. The Japanese Yakuza and Chinese Triads developed ties and turned to one another for very specific tasks, such as carrying out a particular “hit” or laundering a large sum of money in a different jurisdiction. Though these disparate crime groups were located in different parts of the world, they found ways to build trust and work together in their joint illicit pursuits.

Eventually, specialties emerged and criminal enterprises learned to outsource all tasks not within their specific areas of expertise. For example, in a standard phishing operation, an organized crime group might commission the creation of a scam web page and contact a secondary broker to get a list of thousands of email addresses. Using another intermediary, the crime group would get access to a compromised computer and rent a botnet to distribute the spam emails for a period of agreed upon time, such as 12 or 24 hours.

As hapless victims readily provided their banking and credit card information, the data would be culled and forwarded to the contracting criminals. The crime group would likely rent a distributed proxy network to obfuscate their true locations and to run transactions against the compromised accounts.

Of course, all this money needs to be received, processed and laundered in a way that protects the criminal enterprise, and there are numerous illicit techniques for hiring unsuspecting participants to take on the task. The most common is to place an ad in a print newspaper or an online publication offering opportunities to “work from home” and make “quick money” as an “importer/exporter.”

Using this ruse, organized crime groups have duped thousands into receiving stolen property at their homes and opening shell bank accounts in their own names. After the funds are received in the account of the unwary pawn, he is instructed to immediately send them overseas viaWestern Union

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 720