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The rapid growth of illicit supply chains during and after the Covid-19 pandemic reveals a need for effectively combating and preventing the cross-border movement of contraband, including but not limited to counterfeit goods. A proactive approach by companies along with public stakeholders, such as government agencies and individual consumers, toward disrupting illicit supply chains operating across borders is especially important during moments of global crisis when consumers are more susceptible to unknowingly purchasing substandard counterfeit products such as respirators. While marketplaces, platforms, and other legitimate businesses have worked to prevent movement of counterfeits and illicit goods through their services, the high adaptability and sophistication of counterfeiters requires more preventative and multistakeholder approaches. This article outlines a multidisciplinary and multilayered approach to detecting and disrupting illicit supply chains of counterfeit personal protective equipment (PPE) with a focus on respirators. It utilizes research conducted for a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant on Covid-19 related crime, including the advertising and sale of counterfeit respirators. One layer examines online content as seen by the end user and the activity of vendors or sellers used to advertise and sell counterfeit products. The research is also informed by data on the information, financial, and physical flows of counterfeit respirators obtained through a public-private partnership with George Mason University’s Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC-GMU) and 3M, one of the largest manufacturers of respirators in the world. The article examines an important and relatively recent trend - how emerging technological shifts in the marketplace are affecting global security. Research from the TraCCC-GMU and 3M partnership, including a data sharing agreement, revealed that counterfeiters constantly change their modus operandi to continue selling illicit goods with impunity, facilitating illicit activity with the use and abuse of legitimate companies such as ecommerce marketplaces and social media. The article presents an overview of the current state of counterfeit supply chains and provides concrete policy recommendations on how legitimate companies can move beyond just removing listings but must also actively prevent these transnational crimes through innovative multidisciplinary approaches, advanced data analytics, and public awareness campaigns. The research also seeks to connect the dots to broader policy implications in terms of the legitimate economy and environmental sustainability.
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Demystifying Local Business Search Poisoning for Illicit Drug Promotion
A new type of underground illicit drug promotion, illicit drug business listings on local search services (e.g., local knowledge panel, map search, voice search), is increasingly being utilized by miscreants to advertise and sell controlled substances on the Internet. Miscreants exploit the problematic upstream local data brokers featuring loose control on data quality to post listings that promote illicit drug business. Such a promotion, in turn, pollutes the major downstream search providers’ knowledge bases and further reaches a large audience through web, map, and voice searches. To the best of our knowledge, little has been done so far to understand this new illicit promotion in terms of its scope, impact, and techniques, not to mention any effort to identify such illicit drug business listings on a large scale. In this paper, we report the first measurement study of the illicit drug business listings on local search services. Our findings have brought to light the vulnerable and less regulated local business listing ecosystem and the pervasiveness of such illicit activities, as well as the impact on local search audience.
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- PAR ID:
- 10355440
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceeding of ISOC Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2021
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2022.24284
