Law enforcement agencies (LEAs) face a stern challenge in dealing with drug trafficking. The crime rings driving the drug trade are well-financed, and their transnational nature poses an inherent challenge to LEAs operating within geographically limited jurisdictions. Drug trafficking rings are not always technologically sophisticated, but at a minimum are adept at using contemporary technologies such as social media and encrypted messaging to their advantage.
The use of internet communications channels affords criminals a measure of anonymity, and moves much of the drug trade from the street corner to the online drug dealer. Yet, this also creates vulnerabilities that can be exploited through the use of social media intelligence (SOCMINT) tools.
The Challenge of Contemporary Drug Trafficking
In many respects, the challenge of curbing the drug trade has not changed for LEAs. The international nature of drug trafficking, the vast financial resources of cartels, and the ever-evolving nature of the drug trade are as prominent of issues today as they were 30 years ago.
Still, developments within the last decade have significantly increased the difficulty of effective enforcement. A few representative examples include:
- A rise in prescription drug trafficking: The opioid epidemic was fueled in large part by legitimate or quasi-legitimate prescriptions, and non-opioid prescription drugs of various kinds (legitimate, “grey market,” or adulterated) have become a potent new market in and of themselves.
- Increased specialization: A number of sub-specialties have arisen within the drug trafficking ecosystem. Groups have taken on specialized functions such as transshipping drugs or securing supplies of the necessary precursor chemicals. Successful penetration of one such group is less likely to lead to a takedown of a larger drug ring. This is because they function primarily as subcontractors, and are not deeply tied to the larger organization contracting for their services.
- The impact of fentanyl: The rise of fentanyl and fentanyl-like synthetic opioids has posed a significant challenge to conventional detection methods. Drugs such as cannabis, cocaine, and heroin are shipped in physically larger quantities and are more difficult to conceal. Fentanyl and its analogs are toxic to humans in milligram-scale doses, so the quantity required to make a meaningful impact in a medium-sized city is remarkably compact. It can be concealed anywhere, or even shipped in a courier envelope, rendering port-of-entry detection unlikely. The need for an updated approach to interdiction is clear and pressing.
Online Drug Dealers Are Vulnerable to Online Investigation
With today’s drug trafficking structure, drug-sniffing dogs and X-ray scans of shipping containers are less useful than they were a decade ago. Gaining hard intelligence is the only reliable method of detecting and interdicting drug shipments, whether obtained through old-fashioned human intelligence or electronic surveillance and intelligence.
Communications within and between large-scale criminal organizations are inconsistent. Academics studying the structure of drug trafficking rings have found that some are hierarchical in nature, with a top-down management structure, while others are run communally or on an ad hoc basis, expanding or contracting in sync with fluctuations in demand.
Communications channels are similarly diverse, ranging from careful use of encrypted messaging to ordinary phone calls and texts. Some organizations have significant levels of communication between members. Others use specific individuals who serve as communications hubs or brokers, relaying information from one portion of the organization to another.
At the retail end of the industry, online drug dealers often utilize social media to connect with existing clients, and attract the attention of potential new clients. Unlike those farther up in the hierarchy, their role is to cultivate notice rather than evade it, finding end users for their product.
Each of these communications models represents a compromise between operational security and the efficient function of the business, and each represents potential vulnerabilities that may be exploited adroitly by LEAs.
Introduction to SOCMINT and Drug Trafficking
Social media intelligence-gathering can take many forms. Algorithms can be created to analyze the structure of criminal networks, assessing their resilience in the face of law enforcement activity and, by extension, how best to disrupt their operations. These algorithms may also be used to analyze social media posts for innocuous-sounding words or phrases that are used as euphemisms or terms of art within organized crime circles, providing “weak signals” that, in a large enough body of data, can collectively identify a criminal network and its members.
When such text-based analyses (or other intelligence sources) identify individuals suspected of participating in drug trafficking, or when social media drugs are connected to a specific account, a different type of SOCMINT – typified by Spokeo for Business – comes into play. While the algorithms previously discussed analyze the content of social media posts, Spokeo’s social media search excels in the area of uncovering links between what is being said and who is saying it, even if their social media account is using an alias.
These links are traced from the over 12 billion data points in Spokeo’s databases, drawn from over 5000 individual sources ranging from regulated data and government records to an uncommonly deep pool of social networks. Spokeo searches 129 discrete platforms, finding connections between accounts on those platforms and the phone numbers or email addresses used to create the accounts. These, in turn, can reveal the true names behind even anonymous or pseudonymous accounts.
Utilizing Spokeo for Business to Disrupt Drug Trafficking
Attaching a real-world name to a drug-linked online account can often open a number of avenues to investigators. Additionally, Spokeo’s search results frequently return additional details, including current and former addresses, phone numbers, or email addresses associated with a person of interest, as well as possible close relatives, employment history, criminal records (where applicable), and more.
This suggests a number of potential use cases, in which Spokeo’s search results – either in and of themselves, or as a complement to other forms of SOCMINT – can be leveraged to find the vulnerabilities in a drug trafficking organization. Here, we explore just a few of the possible use cases.
Identifying Persons of Interest From a Social Media Alias
Public-facing social media accounts linked to online drug dealers typically fall into two categories. One is dealers peddling social media drugs to their followers, often using euphemistic slang that is opaque to the uninformed. A second is accounts intended not to drum up business, but as recruiting or propaganda tools for the crime ring they represent. These may promote the high earnings and lavish lifestyle available to willing participants in the business, or conversely intimidate others who might wish to stand up to the drug traffickers.
Using Spokeo for Business, it is possible to search these accounts using nothing more than their pseudonymous username or “handle.” If the person behind the account has been careless or ill-trained in operational security, the username could be traced to a specific phone number or email account. Conventional methods can then be employed to further investigate or track the now-known person of interest, their devices, and their associates.
Disclaimer: Please note that Spokeo’s billions of data points apply only to residents of the United States. Information pertaining to non-US persons, phone numbers, and online accounts must be pursued through appropriate interagency and international channels.
Exploring the Contacts of a Known or Suspected Drug Trafficker
Identifying a suspected drug trafficker or online drug dealer, by connecting them to an active account’s alias or through some other means, affords investigators an opportunity to then explore all of that person’s contacts, followers, and associates.
Each interaction with another account provides a new name or username that can be utilized in a follow-up Spokeo search. In time, investigators plotting the links between these contacts and followers may be able to differentiate between their personal connections and their criminal associates.
As more connections are uncovered, the number of links between suspected gang members can help determine whether a given drug trafficking ring’s structure is highly networked (many connections between members) or whether its operatives are connected to a central hub figure but not to each other.
With that established, investigators can strategize for maximum disruption. Consider the following examples…
- A highly networked organization is resilient in the face of arrests, because members are interconnected enough to absorb numerous losses and still retain a functional organization. LEAs using Spokeo for Business to trace those interconnections can potentially act against enough members of the organization simultaneously to overcome that innate resilience.
- An organization on the hub-and-spokes model is more secure, because few of its members know or can identify anyone other than the person who serves as the hub. It can lose a number of spokes and still function, but the loss of one or more hubs can be highly disruptive. Repeated Spokeo searches of suspected traffickers’ contacts can help identify the individuals acting as hubs, and ideally make connections between multiple hubs as well. Making arrests of one or more hubs can temporarily cripple a drug trafficking ring’s local operations.
Empowering Advanced Investigations with Spokeo for Business
Spokeo for Business brings best-in-class SOCMINT capabilities within the reach of most LEAs, regardless of their size or IT resources.
For LEAs in smaller and less-populous jurisdictions, where the drug traffic may flow through as few as a handful of individuals, Spokeo can be used as a low-cost, standalone investigative tool to detect those individuals and bring them before the courts. Spokeo’s ease of use, ease of administration and finely tuned onboarding process provide all the help a poorly-resourced LEA might need to use the product effectively.
For larger LEAs that can draw on the resources of a full-fledged IT department, Spokeo can be deployed in conjunction with other SOCMINT or OSINT analysis tools, filling the gaps in their capabilities. Spokeo’s powerful application programming interface (API) can be used to integrate it with other third-party offerings, existing law enforcement tools, and databases. Spokeo’s data may then be served through an existing, familiar interface.
For a more complete picture of how Spokeo could be used to empower your own drug trafficking investigations, reach out to our team through the product’s Law Enforcement page. Our agents will be happy to provide additional details, provide a demonstration of the product, or arrange for a free hands-on trial.
Sources
International Narcotics Control Board: GRIDS
International Narcotics Control Board: Global 0piods Project
Crime Science: Drug Supply Networks: A Systematic Review of the Organizational Structure of Illicit Drug Trade; Giseli Bichler, Aili Malm, Tristen Cooper; 31 January 2017
PLoS One: Sociometric Network Analysis in Illicit Drugs Research: A Scoping Review; Naomi Zakimi, et al; 27 February 2023
Security Informatics: Organized Crime and Social Media; A System for Detecting, Corroborating and Visualizing Weak Signals of Organized Crime Online; Simon Andrews, Ben Brewster, Tony Day; 13 December 2018
Per Concordiam: Social Media Intelligence: Using Facebook, Twitter and Other Sites to Combat Organized Crime
International Narcotics Control Board: The Role of the Internet in Drug Trafficking and Drug Use is Highlighted in the International Narcotics Control Board Annual Report