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From the beginnings of Silk Road in 2011, anonymous online marketplaces have continued to grow despite the best efforts of law enforcement. While these ever-present marketplaces remain flooded with illicit drugs and related paraphernalia, the sale and distribution of fraudulent identity documents remains a persistent problem, with these items consistently appearing for sale on both the open and dark web. While fraudulent Australian documents are some of the most popular products for sale, there is still much that is unknown about the Australian criminal market and its place within anonymous online marketplaces. Given the success of previous research in understanding the illicit drug trade through examining these marketplaces, this work examines two markets to gain an understanding of where Australian document fraud sits within this digital ecosystem. Two anonymous online marketplaces were crawled across 2020 and 2021, White House Market (WHM), and Empire Market. This data was extracted and examined to identify trends within both the international online market and the online market specifically for Australian documents, both of which have been relatively underexplored in the online space. To help illuminate the features of the market, the types of documents for sale, supply and demand trends, and trafficking flows along with vendor-related trends (e.g. product diversification and presence across markets) were examined. Each market was examined individually and then, where possible, comparisons were drawn to gain a more holistic understanding of the online fraudulent document market, with a specific focus on Australian products. Results indicate that, while the fraudulent document portion of the market is small, it is diverse, with numerous different identity-related products for sale, the most common being driver's licences from the United States (U.S.) and Australia, with digital documents dominating the whole marketplace. Overall, the most popular U.S. products were those that could be used to facilitate identity fraud, with the most popular Australian products being driver's licences and ID packs, likely linked to the presence of the 100-point identity check system used in Australia. This study demonstrates that anonymous online marketplaces have thus far been under-utilised in the study of the fraudulent document market, and that to properly understand the illicit market for fraudulent documents and personal information both the online and physical sides of the market should be considered. This information, if properly utilised, can improve the current understanding of this persistent criminal environment, building on previous research and assisting policymakers in making informed decisions., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors have no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Over the years, forensic science has primarily positioned itself as a service provider for the criminal justice system, following the dominant and traditional reactive law enforcement model. Unfortunately, this focus has limited its capacity to provide knowledge about crime systems and to support other forms of policing styles through forensic intelligence. Although forensic intelligence research has steadily developed over the last few years, it is rarely covered in the core of academic teaching and research programs. Developing forensic intelligence programs would empower graduates with an awareness of forensic intelligence meaning and models, creating great opportunities to shape their future professional activities and progressively shift the dominant paradigm through a bottom-up approach. In this article, the teaching and learning strategies in forensic intelligence developed at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and adapted at the University of Technology Sydney (Australia) and the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (Canada) are presented. The objective behind the strategy is to reflect on and work on real case scenarios using a progressive teaching and learning approach that builds upon the theory and practical exercise putting students in real-life situations. Through this innovative learning process, students move away from the Court as the sole end purpose of forensic science. They learn to adopt different roles, adopt a proactive attitude as well as work individually and collaboratively. This teaching and learning strategy breaks the current silos observed in the forensic science discipline by focusing on processes and critical thinking. It can be foreseen, through the evolution of crime and policing models, that the learning and teaching strategy described in this article offers and will offer the students with many new job opportunities. The article concludes with the advantages that such teaching and learning programs in forensic intelligence bring to the forensic science community., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest None., (Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Criminal offenders missing from police files limit the capacity to reconstruct criminal networks for criminological research and operational purposes. Recent studies show that forensic DNA databanks offer potential to address this problem, through large-scale analysis of DNA matches, many of which involve unidentified offenders. Applying social network analysis (SNA) to 18 years of DNA match data from Québec, Canada, we found that 1400 unknowns do not occupy more marginal positions in the network than 13,000 known offenders, and explain up to 18% of SNA values (e.g., betweenness centrality) for the latter while supporting 46% of their clustering values. Our results contrast with previous studies, showing moreover that unknown individuals who are positioned centrally in a network may have a larger impact than previously expected on investigation policing with implications for forensic intelligence., Competing Interests: Declarations of interest None., (Copyright © 2021 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Forensic science has been evolving towards a separation of more and more specialised tasks, with forensic practitioners increasingly identifying themselves with only one sub-discipline or task of forensic science. Such divisions are viewed as a threat to the advancement of science because they tend to polarise researchers and tear apart scientific communities. The objective of this article is to highlight that a piece of information is not either intelligence or evidence, and that a forensic scientist is not either an investigator or an evaluator, but that these notions must all be applied in conjunction to successfully understand a criminal problem or solve a case. To capture the scope, strength and contribution of forensic science, this paper proposes a progressive but non-linear continuous model that could serve as a guide for forensic reasoning and processes. In this approach, hypothetico-deductive reasoning, iterative thinking and the notion of entropy are used to frame the continuum, situate forensic scientists' operating contexts and decision points. Situations and examples drawn from experience and practice are used to illustrate the approach. The authors argue that forensic science, as a discipline, should not be defined according to the context it serves (i.e. an investigation, a court decision or an intelligence process), but as a general, scientific and holistic trace-focused practice that contributes to a broad range of goals in various contexts. Since forensic science does not work in isolation, the approach also provides a useful basis as to how forensic scientists should contribute to collective and collaborative problem-solving to improve justice and security., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Illicit drug analyses usually focus on the identification and quantitation of questioned material to support the judicial process. In parallel, more and more laboratories develop physical and chemical profiling methods in a forensic intelligence perspective. The analysis of large databases resulting from this approach enables not only to draw tactical and operational intelligence, but may also contribute to the strategic overview of drugs markets. In Western Switzerland, the chemical analysis of illicit drug seizures is centralised in a laboratory hosted by the University of Lausanne. For over 8 years, this laboratory has analysed 5875 cocaine and 2728 heroin specimens, coming from respectively 1138 and 614 seizures operated by police and border guards or customs. Chemical (major and minor alkaloids, purity, cutting agents, chemical class), physical (packaging and appearance) as well as circumstantial (criminal case number, mass of drug seized, date and place of seizure) information are collated in a dedicated database for each specimen. The study capitalises on this extended database and defines several indicators to characterise the structure of drugs markets, to follow-up on their evolution and to compare cocaine and heroin markets. Relational, spatial, temporal and quantitative analyses of data reveal the emergence and importance of distribution networks. They enable to evaluate the cross-jurisdictional character of drug trafficking and the observation time of drug batches, as well as the quantity of drugs entering the market every year. Results highlight the stable nature of drugs markets over the years despite the very dynamic flows of distribution and consumption. This research work illustrates how the systematic analysis of forensic data may elicit knowledge on criminal activities at a strategic level. In combination with information from other sources, such knowledge can help to devise intelligence-based preventive and repressive measures and to discuss the impact of countermeasures., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Forensic intelligence has recently gathered increasing attention as a potential expansion of forensic science that may contribute in a wider policing and security context. Whilst the new avenue is certainly promising, relatively few attempts to incorporate models, methods and techniques into practical projects are reported. This work reports a practical application of a generalised and transversal framework for developing forensic intelligence processes referred to here as the Transversal model adapted from previous work. Visual features present in the images of four datasets of false identity documents were systematically profiled and compared using image processing for the detection of a series of modus operandi (M.O.) actions. The nature of these series and their relation to the notion of common source was evaluated with respect to alternative known information and inferences drawn regarding respective crime systems. 439 documents seized by police and border guard authorities across 10 jurisdictions in Switzerland with known and unknown source level links formed the datasets for this study. Training sets were developed based on both known source level data, and visually supported relationships. Performance was evaluated through the use of intra-variability and inter-variability scores drawn from over 48,000 comparisons. The optimised method exhibited significant sensitivity combined with strong specificity and demonstrates its ability to support forensic intelligence efforts., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Following their detection and seizure by police and border guard authorities, false identity and travel documents are usually scanned, producing digital images. This research investigates the potential of these images to classify false identity documents, highlight links between documents produced by a same modus operandi or same source, and thus support forensic intelligence efforts. Inspired by previous research work about digital images of Ecstasy tablets, a systematic and complete method has been developed to acquire, collect, process and compare images of false identity documents. This first part of the article highlights the critical steps of the method and the development of a prototype that processes regions of interest extracted from images. Acquisition conditions have been fine-tuned in order to optimise reproducibility and comparability of images. Different filters and comparison metrics have been evaluated and the performance of the method has been assessed using two calibration and validation sets of documents, made up of 101 Italian driving licenses and 96 Portuguese passports seized in Switzerland, among which some were known to come from common sources. Results indicate that the use of Hue and Edge filters or their combination to extract profiles from images, and then the comparison of profiles with a Canberra distance-based metric provides the most accurate classification of documents. The method appears also to be quick, efficient and inexpensive. It can be easily operated from remote locations and shared amongst different organisations, which makes it very convenient for future operational applications. The method could serve as a first fast triage method that may help target more resource-intensive profiling methods (based on a visual, physical or chemical examination of documents for instance). Its contribution to forensic intelligence and its application to several sets of false identity documents seized by police and border guards will be developed in a forthcoming article (part II)., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The late president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, died in November 2004 in Percy Hospital, one month after having experienced a sudden onset of symptoms that included severe nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal pain and which were followed by multiple organ failure. In spite of numerous investigations performed in France, the pathophysiological mechanisms at the origin of the symptoms could not be identified. In 2011, we found abnormal levels of polonium-210 ((210)Po) in some of Arafat's belongings that were worn during his final hospital stay and which were stained with biological fluids. This finding led to the exhumation of Arafat's remains in 2012. Significantly higher (up to 20 times) activities of (210)Po and lead-210 ((210)Pb) were found in the ribs, iliac crest and sternum specimens compared to reference samples from the literature (p-value <1%). In all specimens from the tomb, (210)Po activity was supported by a similar activity of (210)Pb. Biokinetic calculations demonstrated that a (210)Pb impurity, as identified in a commercial source of 3MBq of (210)Po, may be responsible for the activities measured in Arafat's belongings and remains 8 years after his death. The absence of myelosuppression and hair loss in Mr Arafat's case compared to Mr Litvinenko's, the only known case of malicious poisoning with (210)Po, could be explained by differences in the time delivery-scheme of intake. In conclusion, statistical Bayesian analysis combining all the evidence gathered in our forensic expert report moderately supports the proposition that Mr Arafat was poisoned by (210)Po., (Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

The development of forensic intelligence relies on the expression of suitable models that better represent the contribution of forensic intelligence in relation to the criminal justice system, policing and security. Such models assist in comparing and evaluating methods and new technologies, provide transparency and foster the development of new applications. Interestingly, strong similarities between two separate projects focusing on specific forensic science areas were recently observed. These observations have led to the induction of a general model (Part I) that could guide the use of any forensic science case data in an intelligence perspective. The present article builds upon this general approach by focusing on decisional and organisational issues. The article investigates the comparison process and evaluation system that lay at the heart of the forensic intelligence framework, advocating scientific decision criteria and a structured but flexible and dynamic architecture. These building blocks are crucial and clearly lay within the expertise of forensic scientists. However, it is only part of the problem. Forensic intelligence includes other blocks with their respective interactions, decision points and tensions (e.g. regarding how to guide detection and how to integrate forensic information with other information). Formalising these blocks identifies many questions and potential answers. Addressing these questions is essential for the progress of the discipline. Such a process requires clarifying the role and place of the forensic scientist within the whole process and their relationship to other stakeholders., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Forensic intelligence is a distinct dimension of forensic science. Forensic intelligence processes have mostly been developed to address either a specific type of trace or a specific problem. Even though these empirical developments have led to successes, they are trace-specific in nature and contribute to the generation of silos which hamper the establishment of a more general and transversal model. Forensic intelligence has shown some important perspectives but more general developments are required to address persistent challenges. This will ensure the progress of the discipline as well as its widespread implementation in the future. This paper demonstrates that the description of forensic intelligence processes, their architectures, and the methods for building them can, at a certain level, be abstracted from the type of traces considered. A comparative analysis is made between two forensic intelligence approaches developed independently in Australia and in Europe regarding the monitoring of apparently very different kind of problems: illicit drugs and false identity documents. An inductive effort is pursued to identify similarities and to outline a general model. Besides breaking barriers between apparently separate fields of study in forensic science and intelligence, this transversal model would assist in defining forensic intelligence, its role and place in policing, and in identifying its contributions and limitations. The model will facilitate the paradigm shift from the current case-by-case reactive attitude towards a proactive approach by serving as a guideline for the use of forensic case data in an intelligence-led perspective. A follow-up article will specifically address issues related to comparison processes, decision points and organisational issues regarding forensic intelligence (part II)., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

False identity documents constitute a potential powerful source of forensic intelligence because they are essential elements of transnational crime and provide cover for organized crime. In previous work, a systematic profiling method using false documents' visual features has been built within a forensic intelligence model. In the current study, the comparison process and metrics lying at the heart of this profiling method are described and evaluated. This evaluation takes advantage of 347 false identity documents of four different types seized in two countries whose sources were known to be common or different (following police investigations and dismantling of counterfeit factories). Intra-source and inter-sources variations were evaluated through the computation of more than 7500 similarity scores. The profiling method could thus be validated and its performance assessed using two complementary approaches to measuring type I and type II error rates: a binary classification and the computation of likelihood ratios. Very low error rates were measured across the four document types, demonstrating the validity and robustness of the method to link documents to a common source or to differentiate them. These results pave the way for an operational implementation of a systematic profiling process integrated in a developed forensic intelligence model., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)