[PDF] Understanding eWhoring | Semantic Scholar (2024)

A processing pipeline is presented to quantitatively analyse various aspects of eWhoring, including the acquisition and provenance of images; the financial profits and monetisation techniques; and a social network analysis of the offenders.

It is found that users who post on music boards post significantly less criminal content elsewhere on the forum, however when broken down by crime type they are significantly more likely to post about eWhoring and trading credentials than other forum users.

It is found that forums do in fact provide a channel for CaaS supply and demand to meet, but only a fraction of the CaAS landscape is seen and there is no evidence in the data for the supposed growth ofCaaS over time.

A novel solution to detect organized fraud by analyzing orders in bulk based on clustering that detects 26.2% of fraud while raising false alarms for only 0.1% of legitimate orders is proposed.

Overall, the authors see an increasing trend towards financially-driven cybercrime, at both the user and forum level, and forum activity has trended away from gaming/social activity, trending towards more activity in market-related boards.

These findings indicate forum users are using argot to overcome the cold start problem, a conundrum faced by new users to social networks with ranking systems and marketplaces with feedback systems.

It is argued that finality is the main advantage of CCs for this user group, not anonymity as widely thought, and an Operational Security Taxonomy for Illicit Internet Activity is proposed to show that banning CCs is unlikely to be effective.

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A crime script analysis will reveal the most common ways in which carding is executed, and proposes the uptake of prospect theory as an analytical tool to account for deviations from the criminal optimal norm.

Using a seven month trace of logs collected from an active underground market operating on public Internet chat networks, this paper measures how the shift from “hacking for fun” to “ hacking for profit” has given birth to a societal maturity mature enough to steal wealth into the millions of dollars in less than one year.

It is shown that different types of scammers target a different demographics on the site, and therefore set up accounts with different characteristics, which shed light on the threats associated to online dating scams, and can help researchers and practitioners in developing effective countermeasures to fight them.

CrimeBot is described, a crawler designed around the particular challenges of capturing data from underground forums, used to update and maintain CrimeBB, a dataset of more than 48m posts made from 1m accounts in 4 different operational forums over a decade.

This paper quantifies the full set of resources employed to monetize spam email -- including naming, hosting, payment and fulfillment -- using extensive measurements of three months of diverse spam data, broad crawling of naming and hosting infrastructures, and over 100 purchases from spam-advertised sites.

It is demonstrated that targeting the sale of kits for HYIPs and aggregators would be a key step towards disrupting the HYIP ecosystem, with the removal of the aggregator sites the next most important action that is needed.

The findings indicate that carding forums facilitate organised cybercrime because they offer a hybrid form of organisational structure that is able to address sources of uncertainty and minimise transaction costs to an extent that allows a competitive underground market to emerge.

This crime script analysis provides an overview of the trade in fraudulently obtained tickets, drawing on interviews with industry and law enforcement, and an analysis of an online blackmarket, and identifies additional interventions, aimed at the act, the actor, and the marketplace.

It is found that despite its newness, an estimated 230,000 British citizens may have fallen victim to this crime and there needs to be some rethinking about providing avenues for victims to report the crime or at least making them more comfortable when doing so.

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