The Dark Side of the Internet. How to find criminals in DeepWeb.

No artificial intelligence will replace a police investigation

When investigators discover activity associated with drugs in the real world, they begin to wonder what is being done online. Observing and conducting secret operations, they find common ground between virtual and real worlds. For example, Ross Ulbricht was arrested in 2013 after he used the public Wi-Fi network. His access to the network coincided with the appearance of the administrator of the "dark" forum Silk Road in the virtual space.

How to get data from public sites

Drug dealers use their conspiratorial sites only as shops for sale. They mainly search for clients in common networks. Thus, dealers are more vulnerable. Any owner of a public site is required by law to transmit user data. For example, several Reddit users who discussed buying and selling prohibited substances on one of the "dark" ones were detained after the Reddit administration disclosed their contact details to the police. And the same Ulbricht negligently left his email address on public networks.

How to intercept postal items

Policemen cooperate with delivery companies. Also, they work with post offices to locate and investigate postal items that cause suspicion. Police officers also take the number of a suspicious packet in order to track who will receive it.

Artificial Intelligence and Big data

Using large amounts of data, police identify connections that are often difficult, if not impossible to establish, in other ways. This is a very expensive and quite complex system. And yet its use pays off with interest. Everything is taken into account. IP-addresses, online information. As a result, conclusions are drawn and machines with artificial intelligence are trained on them.

Cash flows. How they are tracked

Many people know that bitcoin (crypto currency) has a high degree of anonymity. However, the weak point of the digital currency is its purchase and sale. Police demand data from exchanges trading bitcoin and find out who and when made transactions with the crypto currency. Also, the police cooperate with banks, with the same purpose.

How they work undercover

Often, law enforcers are in the confidence of administrators of prohibited sites. Also, they can portray themselves as wholesale and retail buyers or portray sellers.

Breaking

Often, by order of policemen, the software is modified and used to identify users of the "dark" Internet. This is how one of the big illegal forums was discovered. The FBI introduced a vulnerability into it. This vulnerability sent them all the IP addresses of users of this forum.

In practice, the anonymity of users of the "dark" Internet leaves much to be desired. Scammers go unpunished for the time being, until the time. This happens until the police seriously they are not interested. Often the countermeasures of security guards are based on the classic methods of investigation, rather than on the newest technologies of machine learning.