Many private, for-profit firms possess expertise in pursuing financial fraud investigations. Indeed, most insurance companies have an in-house special investigation unit (SIU) whose sole purpose is to investigate insurance fraud. Staff within such units include professionals experienced in conducting criminal investigations and forensic accountants skilled in detecting financial irregularities from online sources. Such a firm would be able to assign one of their existing fraud investigation units to wildlife trafficking investigations.
In this kit, a hypothetical insurance firm has chosen a class of auto insurance policies for their biodiversity offering. This firm has identified their biodiversity project to be the investigation of Bengal tiger poaching and Bengal tiger parts trafficking. The files in this kit detail a hypothetical investigation into such trafficking. The end result of this investigation is the sharing of evidence and recommended actions with India's wildlife crime control bureau (see the simulator page). The files in this kit constitute an extension and completion of the example sketched in the 2023 Journal of Cybersecurity article.
To aid their investigation of Bengal tiger parts trafficking, the firm has voluntarily joined a confederation of wildlife trafficking investigators. This confederation employs a software system that allows confederation members to share among themselves, intelligence on traffickers and tiger parts shipments. The software package that builds this system can be accessed here.
Further, this firm has volunteered to maintain the logistics node (see above article) of the confederation's federated database of criminal intelligence. This node stores each confederation member's contact information; auditing and security information on each database node; and ensures that access to any criminal intelligence held in the confederation's database is managed by the GLAD access control tool. This tool ensures that a single member's security concerns are not over-ruled by a cadre of other members.
Any individual engaged in the physical, violent acquisition of tiger parts through the poaching (shooting, trapping, or poisoning) of live tigers is referred to here as a poacher. Tiger poachers; middlemen that sponsor poaching raids; and those criminals who arrange tiger parts shipments are all traffickers. These traffickers are all members of a particular wildlife trafficking syndicate (WTS) (see 2023 Journal of Cybersecurity).
The kit's simulator is fitted to a political-ecological data set. This fitted simulator is then used to predict the tiger poaching rate assuming an identifiable set of traffickers are active in the simulator. These poaching rate predictions are central to optimally assigning traffickers to the investigation's Detain, Surveil, and Interdict lists that are then shared with India's wildlife crime control bureau. These poaching rate predictions are generated by the simulator rather than by analysis of the confederation's associated social network model of the targeted WTS.