Cyber Fraud

Law enforcement’s job of identifying trafficking victims and taking down organized crime isn’t easy. Sorting through hundreds of thousands of daily online illicit campaigns becomes increasingly difficult when a significant portion of the campaigns are fake, copied profiles, or are phishing attempts. In a June 2020 study of 35,000 unique digital illicit campaigns in a state, Marinus found that over 20% of the campaigns were mass-produced, and data from the Federal Trade Commission suggests an increase in online scam activity in 2019, when customers reported a loss of $201 million to scams such as romance scams, a year-over-year increase of 40%.

In partnership with IBM Watson, we are building tools to determine who is creating them, where they originate, and who might be profiting. This fraud is lucrative, underreported, and its volume is unrestricted. Fake campaigns linked to Cyber Fraud have been detected in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, including duplicate campaigns placed simultaneously on both continents; some of the activity suggests they may be linked to credit card harvesting or subscription fraud and funding organized crime. We are working with organizations such as the National Cyber Forensics & Training Alliance (NCFTA) to identify and combat these crimes.