The spread of Internet gambling has raised several issues concerning motivations to gamble, consumer behaviour online, problem gambling, security of Web sites, and fairness and integrity of the games. Rather surprisingly, however, there has been little in the way of research regarding online crime and Internet gambling even though it is an urgent priority. This article addresses this absence by investigating the types, techniques, and organizational dynamics of online crime at the portals of Internet gambling sites. Our approach is qualitative in nature and explores, using document analysis, the activities of cybernomads, dot.con teams, and criminal networks. We demonstrate that there are different levels of criminal organization, distinguished by their complexity of division of labour; coordination of roles; purposefulness of association between criminals; and ability to avoid, evade, or neutralize security systems and law enforcement. We conclude by arguing that conventional understandings of real-world gambling-related criminal relationships have been altered by the digital environment of the Internet.
Despite the devastating short-and long-term consequences of resource-related environmental crimes, rampant illegal soil and sand mining continues worldwide. In countries such as India and Italy, organized crime groups have emerged as prominent illegal suppliers of soil and sand. The proposed study focuses on an understudied research area at the intersection between organized crime and environmental crimes, and offers a trans-comparative study of illegal soil and sand mining conducted by Indian and Italian organized crime groups with two main objectives. First, a comparative analysis of the organizational mechanisms, operational practices, threat management, and supporting cultural, regulatory, and policing factors is conducted. Second, a discussion of how these groups reflect mainstream models and theories of organized crime is offered.
Illicit supply networks (ISNs) are composed of coordinated human actors that source, transit, and distribute illicitly traded goods to consumers, while also creating widespread social and environmental harms. Despite growing documentation of ISNs and their impacts, efforts to understand and disrupt ISNs remain insufficient due to the persistent lack of knowledge connecting a given ISN's modus operandi and its patterns of activity in space and time. The core challenge is that the data and knowledge needed to integrate it remain fragmented and/or compartmentalized across disciplines, research groups, and agencies tasked with understanding or monitoring one or a few specific ISNs. One path forward is to conduct comparative analyses of multiple diverse ISNs. We present and apply a conceptual framework for linking ISN modus operandi to spatial-temporal dynamics and patterns of activity. We demonstrate this through a comparative analysis of three ISNs -cocaine, illegally traded wildlife, and illegally mined sand -which range from well-established to emergent, global to domestic in geographic scope, and fully illicit to de facto legal. The proposed framework revealed consistent traits related to geographic price structure, value capture at different supply chain stages, and key differences among ISN structure and operation related to commodity characteristics and their relative illicitness. Despite the diversity of commodities and ISN attributes compared, social and environmental harms inflicted by the illicit activity consistently become more widespread with increasing law enforcement disruption. Drawing on these lessons from diverse ISNs, which varied in their histories and current sophistication, possible changes in the structure and function of nascent and/or low salience ISNs may be anticipated if future conditions or law enforcement pressure change.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.