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 Intel kit, a hypothetical insurance firm has chosen an auto insurance policy package that they call ``Protection Plus'' for their biodiversity offering. See Plymouth RockTM for a real-world example. This firm has identified their biodiversity project to be the investigation of rhino poaching and rhino horn trafficking out of South Africa. The files in this Intel kit detail a hypothetical investigation into such trafficking. The end result of this investigation is the sharing of evidence and recommended actions with South Africa's wildlife crime control bureau (see the simulator page). The files in this Intel kit constitute an extension and completion of the example sketched in the 2023 Journal of Cybersecurity article.
To aid their investigation of rhino horn 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 rhino horn 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 protocol. This protocol 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 animals/plants or their parts through the poaching (shooting, trapping, or poisoning) of live animals/plants is referred to here as a poacher. Poachers; middlemen that sponsor poaching raids; and those criminals who arrange shipments of live animals/plants or their parts are all traffickers. Traffickers are typically all members of a particular wildlife trafficking syndicate (WTS) (see 2023 Journal of Cybersecurity).
The Intel kit's simulator is fitted to a political-ecological data set. This fitted simulator is then used to predict the rhino's per-region risk of extinction. These extinction risk predictions are central to optimally assigning traffickers to the investigation's Detain, Surveil, and Interdict lists that are then shared with several wildlife crime control agencies. Extinction risks are generated by the simulator rather than by analysis of the confederation's associated social network model of the rhino-attacking WTS.