Piercing the veil of anonymous Online Financial Transactions

The Online Financial Transaction (OFT) services landscape has grown with the widespread commoditization of e-commerce. Though developed for legitimate commercial means, new technologies have created many ways to anonymously transfer funds over communication networks. Law enforcement agencies now face a unique and nearly insurmountable problem: cybercriminals are able to anonymously exchange financial resources and goods, hiding virtually all traces of evidence in a complex web of financial services. Consequently, OFTs pose a significant risk to law enforcement and intelligence agencies because such anonymous transactions have become difficult to monitor and provide new opportunities to the criminals who threaten our physical world. The focus of this capstone project was to increase the understanding of anonymous OFTs using a three step approach. The first step involved developing a standardized identity framework to classify levels of anonymity in online transactions. The second step was the creation of a comprehensive database of OFT services and the information each of these services collects during individual transactions. This database incorporates the Identity Elements framework and stores relationships between OFTs. This information is then used by a suite of client applications, the third step in our approach, to analyze financial transactions. Overall, the combination of an identity framework and analytic tools forms a better understanding of the potential threats posed by dynamic anonymous technologies, and is intended to grow to function as an active method used to catch and monitor criminals.