Shortlisting the Influential Members of Criminal Organizations and Identifying Their Important Communication Channels

Low-level criminals, who do the legwork in a criminal organization, are the most likely to be arrested, whereas the high-level ones tend to avoid attention. But crippling the work of criminal organizations is not possible unless investigators can identify the most influential, high-level members and monitor their communication channels. Investigators often approach this task by requesting the mobile phone service records of the arrested low-level criminals to identify contacts, and then they build a network model of the organization, where each node denotes a criminal and the edges represent communications. Network analysis can be used to infer the most influential criminals and most important communication channels within the network, but screening all the nodes and links in a network is laborious and time consuming. Here, we propose a new forensic analysis system called identifying influential criminals and their communication channels (IICCC) that can effectively and efficiently infer the high-level criminals and short-list the important communication channels in a criminal organization, based on the mobile phone communications of its members. IICCC can also be used to build a network from crime incident reports. We evaluated IICCC experimentally and compared it with five other systems, confirming its superior prediction performance.