Investigations Archives

How Online Data & AI Help Fight Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is rampant in our country, but not often mentioned. It happens in the shadows, on the dark web, is hard to track, and tough to talk about.

The crime of human trafficking—defined by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as modern-day slavery that “involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act—is notoriously difficult to prosecute. Victims, who are mostly women and children, often lack legal documentation and many fear reprisals if they go to authorities. Therefore perpetrators go to great lengths to conceal their behavior by laundering money and keeping their operations quiet.

Recently, law enforcement agencies and organizations that help victims of human trafficking have begun using artificial intelligence tools to overcome this lack of visibility. By sorting through data and recognizing patterns faster than any human could, AI tools are helping activists and investigators crack down on buyers of sex, identify trafficking victims and follow illicit money trails.

“Imagine the techniques that Google and Facebook are using to make a profit—understanding people, the way they connect, what their interests are, what they might buy or the activities they engage in,” says Dan Lopresti, professor and chair of the department of science and engineering at Lehigh University’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science. “We can apply those same techniques—data mining, text mining, what’s called graph mining—AI that’s being used for legitimate and really profitable purposes, to track these illicit behaviors.”

Lopresti is involved with the Regional Intelligence and Investigation Center (RIIC) in Allentown, PA. Launched in 2013, the RIIC has “revolutionized” the way area police departments “analyze and share collected data to solve crimes,” according to the office of Lehigh County District Attorney James Martin.

Lopresti, who is an expert in document analysis and pattern recognition, is working with RIIC Director Julia Kocis, prosecutors, law enforcement officials and other Rossin College computer science and engineering faculty members to help overcome the challenges of turning vast amounts of data, primarily from police incident reports, into something useable, despite limited resources.

“If an expert sits down and reads enough of these, he or she will find a common thread—this person is related to this place, which is related to this activity, which is related to this other person,” he says. “The trouble is, they’ve got millions of these reports and just don’t have enough time to read through them. We’re developing natural language techniques, text mining and data mining techniques that are oriented to processing lots of data to identify patterns of behavior that would reflect illegal activities related to human trafficking.”

Because human trafficking is a $150 billion-per-year criminal industry, many companies are joining the fight and helping out. IBM worked with the STOP THE TRAFFIK (STT) coalition to develop a new cloud-hosted data hub that allows financial institutions to run AI and machine learning tools against their data sets to detect “specific human trafficking terms and incidents.” AI also allows the data hub to take in open-source data — including thousands of news feeds each day — to help analysts more easily identify the characteristics of human trafficking incidents.

Entrepreneur Josh McAfee, a former law enforcement officer and loss-prevention executive, is the founder and CEO of McAfee Institute, a Peoria, Illinois-based business that trains corporations and law enforcement agencies to battle cybercrime and fraud. But what brings him the most satisfaction is locating victims of human trafficking.

Since 2011, his company has helped bring back about 1,900 human-trafficking victims, 1,000 of them children.

He now teaches a course on human trafficking to an average of 150 to 200 people a month. “We’re developing leaders in the classroom, so they can go out and utilize our techniques within their organizations. It multiplies our success and enables us to make a huge impact,” says McAfee. “Growing up, I always had a passion for law enforcement. I wanted to get out there and fight crime, get the bad guys–you know, help people. That’s why I became a law enforcement officer right out of college. To be able to do this kind of work in my business is everything to me. It’s what I was born to do.”

How to Manually Get to Deep Web Content

In a recent article , the deep web was clarified – what it is, what it’s not, and why it can be useful. The question that always comes up is, “How can we access it?”

In part, you are accessing it each time you do a Google search – you’re just not going back far enough through the search results. Outside of spending hours weeding through page 25 of a search result, how can deep web searches be more efficient?

1. Google may be a household name, but it’s not the only game in town. Most people rely on Google to be their online search companion. Of course Google is the major player – after all, it’s become more than a search engine – it’s a verb. Don’t forget about the other search engines, namely Bing and Yahoo. While they may be considered the red-headed stepchildren, they can still be helpful. Like software platforms, each of the major search engines has its own algorigthm, which in turn may produce different results. What Google things is unimportant may be significant to Yahoo or Bing, or vice versa. Search using a variety of major search engines to find the most content available.

2. YouTube isn’t just for music anymore. From music to how to videos to families sharing cute kid videos, YouTube has become almost as popular of a search engine as Google. Don’t forget to run searches in YouTube as well.

3. Don’t start at the beginning. When running a general search using Google, Bing, or Yahoo, start at page 3, maybe 4. Don’t start with the first page. Those are the surface web results that you can easily look at later. To get to the deeper content, you’ll need to start on a later page. You will start to find more irrelevant results on these later pages too – don’t let that deter you; within those false positives can be some great information to help in your research efforts.

4. Use more than a name. Don’t just search a person’s name or their name with a city and/or state – search using known user names the person created for social accounts, nicknames, phone numbers, addresses, the person’s name and a family member’s name, you get the idea. Set up searches that use more specific information and you may find more information this way.

5. Learn how to search using Boolean. While you’ve likely heard the term and you’re only knowledge of Boolean search is what most of us think of – using AND, OR, or quotes in your search – there is so much more to it. Setting up specific searches in a certain way can bring those deep web results to the surface. We recommend taking a look at the sites below as a guide to learning how to use Boolean searching to your benefit.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/

https://www.talkwalker.com/blog/how-boolean-search-operators-make-searching-a-piece-of-cake

Knowing how to search efficiently can help you dive into the deep web and find what you might be looking for. It’s not a scary place, like the dark web, and shouldn’t be confused with that. It’s just a matter of having patience and knowing how to search to access this type of information.

How Law Enforcement Uses The Dark Web

Have you ever had your identity stolen? If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky. On a daily basis we hear reports of someone stealing a credit card, hijacking bank accounts, or creating false online profiles. One thing is clear: Cyber criminals are constantly trying to steal our personal information…and this information often ends up on a place called the Dark Web.

So what exactly is the Dark Web?

The dark web is a portion of the internet that can only be accessed by using certain browsers and software.

NBC10 Boston Investigators sat down with Andrei Barysevich, the director of advanced collection for Recorded Future, a Somerville-based cyber intelligence company. “You can pretty much find anything,” Barysevich said. “Stolen identities, credit card numbers, compromised data or weapons and drugs.”

In the past two years, Barysevich has gone from a team of one to a team of several dozen cyber intelligence analysts, combing through more than 2 million Dark Web sources per week. His employees, typically fluent in several foreign languages, act like “flies on the wall” in Dark Web online forums, Barysevich said, attempting to gather information about what’s being bought and sold.

On one disturbing site, Barysevich showed NBC10 Boston Investigator Ryan Kath how easy it is to buy the Social Security number of almost anyone in the United States. Using one of Recorded Future’s accounts to pay the $3 charge, Kath plugged in his name. After a search that only took a few seconds, Kath’s personal information appeared on the screen. Barysevich said everyone should assume their information was at one point stolen and is available on the Dark Web.

Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future said, “Cyber security has grown incredibly in the past few years. It’s the idea of being able to catch cyber threats before they hit you. To do that, you need to infiltrate the places that bad guys hang out.” When valuable information is uncovered, Recorded Future shares the details with the pertinent parties, whether it’s a government agency, financial institution or law enforcement. One notable example was when the company spotted a hacker selling sensitive documents about military drones.

Mark Turnage is another investigator who is familiar with the dark web. Turnage’s company, DarkOwl, helps law enforcement and cyber security firms monitor the criminals who lurk in the dark web. “The dark net is appealing to criminals because it completely anonymizes their presence,” Turnage explained. There are no IP addresses. There is no way to trace the person on a keyboard to a physical location. All law enforcement can do is wait for criminals to slip up.

Luckily, that happened in the case against Danny McLaughlin. The Colorado man is accused of attempting to hold a 13-year-old girl captive for sex and trying to hire a hitman to kill his wife. The criminal complaint filed against McLaughlin says his crimes started on the dark web on a site for people who enjoy torture and killing.

McLaughlin was only identified and caught when investigators say he agreed to meet at a Centennial hotel with the person who had agreed to murder his wife. That person was really an undercover detective.

“Thank goodness he made that mistake and was arrested. Had he not gone to that hotel room, it would have been near impossible for them to figure out who this person was,” said Turnage.

Recently, International police group Interpol arrested nine people in Thailand, Australia, and the U.S. and 50 children had been rescued after investigators took down an online pedophilia ring. Police in nearly 60 countries combined efforts in this Interpol operation launched two years ago into a hidden “dark web” site with 63,000 users worldwide. Fifty children were rescued following the arrests.

Interpol said its Operation Blackwrist began after it found material that was traced back to a subscription-based site on the dark web, where people can use encrypted software to hide behind layers of secrecy. Interpol enlisted help from national agencies worldwide, with the US Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) department eventually tracking the site’s IP address, where new photos and videos were posted weekly.

The first arrests came in early 2018, when the site’s main administrator, Montri Salangam, was detained in Thailand, and another administrator, Ruecha Tokputza, was captured in Australia. Salangam, whose victims included one of his nephews, was sentenced in June last year to 146 years in prison by Thai courts. Interpol said children were lured to Salangam’s home with the promise of food, internet access and soccer games.

One of his associates, a pre-school teacher, got 36 years. Tokputza was handed a 40-year prison term at his trial in Australia last Friday, the longest ever for child sex offences in the country. The Australian Associated Press reported that Tokputza, 31, pleaded guilty to 50 counts of abuse of 11 babies and children — one just 15 months old — between 2011 and 2018. The HSI’s regional attache in Bangkok, Eric McLoughlin, said in the statement that “numerous arrests” had been made in the US. Some held “positions of public trust,” he said, and one individual was abusing his two-year-old stepbrother.

“Operation Blackwrist sends a clear message to those abusing children, producing child sexual exploitation material and sharing the images online: We see you, and you will be brought to justice,” Interpol’s Secretary General Juergen Stock said.

What Can You Do to Avoid the Dark Web?

To reduce your risk of being hacked or having information stolen, Barysevich offers these tips:

• Freeze your credit report, something that can be done for free

• Activate text and email alerts for activity on your bank accounts

• Question why you need to provide a Social Security number or copy of your driver’s license when you visit the doctor, dentist, or other professional office

• Don’t use the same password for multiple online accounts

While some consumers might want to throw up their hands in frustration, Ahlberg — the Recorded Future CEO — said not to give up the fight. The goal is to decrease the odds that you’ll be cyber thieves’ next target.

But That’s Not Our Guy – Why Social Media & Online Research Can Be Frustrating

DIY platforms and other data gathering programs are great, but before you consider them to be inaccurate or not helpful, keep in mind that they are only as good as the person using them for research.

For many professions, including private investigators, law firms, and insurance companies, social media and online research on individuals has opened a new venue for assisting with investigations into court cases, insurance fraud, and other situations.

While it can be done, it can also be time consuming and frustrating. The more common the name, and the less information that is being used to search for a person’s online activity, the longer it can take. One roadblock is information that does not actually belong to the person you’re looking at – their information is getting mixed up with someone else with the same name.

In talking with folks in the industry, this is a pain point that not only makes it more difficult to search for people online, but it also gives the impression that the quality of such searches is not great. This can make investigators leery and question the benefit of conducting such research.

It’s important to remember a few key points when considering options for conducting social and online research:

1. Software is good, but will never be perfect. Whether it’s a DIY online search platform or TLO/Tracers/IDI report, there is a chance that information will be provided that does not in fact belong to the individual you’re interested in, whether it’s a phone number, email address, or social site. The opportunity for false positives is there no matter what platform is being used.

It’s important to utilize multiple software platforms – what one will pick up, another will miss, and what one provides as a “false positive” another will not pick up at all. Each platform works off its own algorithm, or process for producing search results based on what information is provided about an individual.

If an investigator is using such programs to conduct a search, they can be very valuable. However, it is important to keep in mind that not all information provided will be accurate; these are meant to be used as a starting point in an online investigation – manual research & identification will be needed to confirm whether a piece of information really belongs to the person you’re looking at. Typically, if it’s not readily clear from the initial search, a good rule of thumb is to find three pieces of confirmation to ensure it’s the person’s social account or site.

Here’s an example: if you find a Facebook page that you think belongs to the individual, but perhaps it’s not really clear just from looking at the user name or “About” section, take a look at their friends list, places they’ve checked in, “About section” to see if birthdays or employers are listed, etc. If you can identify the location of the individual whose Facebook page you’re looking at, or maybe confirm that some of their Facebook friends are relatives that correspond with findings from a TLO report, then you can be more certain that it’s the right account.

2. What may seem to be inaccurate information can actually be a key to what you’re looking for. Sometimes people will see social reports and say something like, “That phone number for Joe is so old and hasn’t been used in years. This report isn’t accurate at all. I want his current phone number.” Valid point, but here’s something to keep in mind: Joe may have accounts, comments, or forum membership tied to these old numbers. While he’s not currently using the phone number, the accounts still live online and are easier to tie to Joe. Sometimes these old accounts are long forgotten, which means they’re not being scrubbed if they are involved in a situation where a lawyer tells them to “clean up their online presence.” This means that there could be valuable information to find based on what seems to be inaccurate information.

3. DIY programs are great, but they are called DIY for a reason. There are many companies who will allow you to purchase a subscription to an online search product to find content posted by or about an individual. As this type of research has evolved, the services have greatly improved. There is definitely a place for do it yourself search programs – but you have to do it yourself. No matter what the company claims, it will not be as simple as entering some information about an individual and being presented with all of the person’s online activity without any false positives or inaccurate information. It’s going to take you (the “yourself” part in DIY) to validate, investigate, and determine the validity of the results. Before deeming a DIY program as not useful, remember its actual purpose and that it is not meant as a be all end all service. And, if the company is promising that it is, you may want to reconsider using it.

4. There is no magic bullet – online research takes a lot of time. There’s no way around it. While we all wish a software platform would be created to give us instant and completely accurate results, this will likely never happen. Why? Things are changing all the time, whether it’s social media privacy laws, Google algorithm updates, or any number of things that can change in an instant. This is where online and social media research gets tricky and frustrating, leaving people to give up easily. Software can not be relied on as a standalone product – manual research is needed to confirm the validity of the information provided, and then take that information as a starting point and fleshing out what can be found through manual searching. When multiple platforms and other similar products are used simultaneously, the time spent can be greatly reduced. This is why it can be useful to turn to a full-service social media and online research service – they often have efficiencies in place to search quicker and provide more accurate results, which saves a lot of time for those needing to conduct investigations.

DIY platforms and other data gathering programs are great, but before you consider them to be inaccurate or not helpful, keep in mind that they are only as good as the person using them for research. Take them for what they are and realize that they will not be the magic bullet to quickly investigate an individual’s online activity.

Executive Protection on Social Media

With the plethora of information shared on social media, the importance of security is on the rise. For individuals in powerful roles, executives (CEOs and COOs), and celebrities, most of this has to do with the security of personal data. Can hackers get into personal accounts? What will they do with the information they find?

Let’s dive deeper into executive protection (EP) in corporate and high net worth contexts. What can you do to protect your client’s reputation as well as their personal safety? Executive protection teams must be able to handle many different moving parts at once – reputation risk, physical security, and cybersecurity.

Of course, the easiest route is to just stay off social media. But that’s like telling a child not to lick the spoon when baking cake! EP pros need to know how to embrace social media, not reject it. Below are some strategies that can help best protect your clients.

1) Social media is part of our world. Know how to navigate it.

According to recent research by the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, all but three Fortune 500 companies are active on social media with corporate accounts:

98% use LinkedIn
88% use Twitter
85% use Facebook
75% use YouTube
53% use Instagram
42% maintain blogs
31% use Pinterest
10% use Snapchat

Keeping track of what your principal is up to on social media helps EP pros in several ways. It helps you understand what’s going on in his or her life and what’s important to him or her. Being aware of contexts that are meaningful to your client is a good idea no matter what business you’re in – including the business of executive protection.

Also, observing what the principal is doing on social media – and what others are doing on social media regarding your principal – helps you improve your protective practices. You need to follow and understand what everyone else can follow and understand about the principal simply by taking a look at their smartphones. You need to monitor what others monitor. Then you can add your protective perspective so you’re looking for things that can impact the principal’s wellbeing, including time and place predictability.

2) Disable Geo-enabled Social Media Posts

Enabling the public to know your executive’s location opens up an entirely different world of risks, including oversharing information to those who don’t need it. Geo-enabled social media postings through location-based services (LBS) create physical risk, leaving the executive with little to no privacy.

The best way to combat this risk is to remove it completely – turn off the geo-enabled feature for both your executives and their family members.

Social media posts can also increase time and place predictability. A simple Facebook or Instagram post can broadcast your location quickly and accurately. Maybe the principal just wants to say “Hey, check out this cool picture that shows you what I’m up to and who I’m with.” Although it seems harmless, the principal’s time and place predictability helps the bad guys. They conduct surveillance prior to any bad deed: the ability to predict when a victim will be where helps them plan an attack – and increases their chances of getting away with it.

Protective teams can combat this by using surveillance detection and mixing up routes so the principal is not commuting via the same streets at the same time every day. Keep access to principal itineraries to the absolute minimum.

3) Monitor for Executive Account Imposters

There’s always a risk of imposters on any social platform. Fake accounts are used as part of social engineering and spear-phishing attacks to target customers and other key employees.

Make sure you have a verified account or page. That way, if anyone sees a page that is posting as the executive, but knows that that’s not the official page, they tend to be less believing of the content coming from “unverified” pages. Next, you should have a monitoring system with triggers in place that understands the difference between authorized and unauthorized social media accounts quickly, so take-downs can occur quickly.

3) Don’t Reuse Passwords
It sounds simple enough but passwords are the main portal of entry to any account – whether it be social, personal, or financial. Once a hacker has been able to bypass and figure out an executive’s password the risk factor increases exponentially. Have different passwords for each social account – that way even if one account is compromised, the others not mean an immediate compromise

4) Everyone’s a Journalist

EP professionals need to understand the implications of anyone being able to take a picture (of the principal, of the principal’s family or colleagues, and the EP team) and then posting it to social media where millions, can see it in seconds.

Let’s say your principal is in a restaurant having a meal with a colleague or their family. It is quite likely that someone in that restaurant will post a picture on social media, maybe even the restaurant owner trying to announce that a prominent person likes their food. No matter what the instance, it could mean that a crowd of people shows up before dinner is done. And that definitely means your principal’s privacy is in jeopardy. Of course, there is no way to prevent all photos or postings…but EP professionals must consider this type of exposure as part of the overall risk environment.

While these tips can certainly help you reduce the threat posed by social media, it’s inevitable that some information about your organization and its employees will be available to criminals through social media. This is why, no matter what else you do, security training for employees is an essential component of any cybersecurity strategy.