Shocking Behavior
By Charles Clendenen, Infoglide Director of Professional Services
This will rock you to your core: bad guys who are the targets of law enforcement investigations try very hard to hide their identities whenever possible.
OK, so maybe that isn’t so shocking. There are very few of us who have not heard the acronym “AKA” (Also Known As). We associate such terms – AKA, alias, assumed name, handle, etc. – as signaling devious intent. Formal studies have shown that nearly a third of criminals have used false names for the purpose of intentional deception. You might assume criminals prefer to adopt an entirely new and different identity with a different value for every attribute, e.g, name, address, phone, SSN, and so forth. That happens more in the movies than in real life.
When you are living a lie, it can be hard to keep your stories straight. It’s difficult and time-consuming to establish a new identity completely from scratch. When you open a new account at a bank or apply for credit card, for example, a lot of picky little questions get asked, and it takes a lot of attention to detail to change every attribute of your identity. Criminals can get lazy and may cut corners and look for the path of least resistance to get what they want.
So people using fraudulent identities, knowing that their behavior is dishonest and trying to hide their activities in various ways, do so by (1) making transactions look as normal as possible, (2) by obfuscating identity information, and (3) by hiding their relationships with associates. Rather than concoct an entirely new identity, some learn how to obscure their identity to the automated systems that track almost everyone now. They change small details of their identity, like transposing numbers and letters in their address or by slightly changing a phone number
So, how does law enforcement deal with “dirty data” like this when searching with the assistance of technology? It may seem counter-intuitive, but in a typical database search, the more attributes you use in your search, the more records you eliminate from the search results. Try it yourself with your favorite Web search engine. If you are too specific and use too many terms in your search, you will get few results or none at all. With identity resolution and similarity search, you will actually get more results with the most useful results weighted and ranked by proximity to your search terms. Similarity search techniques are also invaluable for extending relationship detection beyond the obvious to the non-obvious.
Just as in other endeavors where authorities and investigators are using technology to find bad guys (e.g. insurance claims processing, airline passenger screening, and retail fraud screening), an emerging technology called identity resolution can sort out true identities and find hidden relationships within previously obscured and obfuscated criminal investigation data sources.
If you have a story to share about the challenges of breaking through to find who’s who and who knows whom in the law enforcement world, drop us a comment.
