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.
As delineated in the 2023 Journal of Cybersecurity article, 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). Any WTS member engaged in the physical, violent acquisition of tiger parts through poaching (shooting, trapping, or poisoning) live tigers is referred to as a poacher. All other WTS members are referred to as middlemen.
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 a certain 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 shared with India's wildlife crime control bureau. These poaching rate predictions are generated by the simulator, not through any social network analysis (SNA) of the investigation's separate trafficker social network model.