Understanding eWhoring
This addresses the problem of online fraud for cybersecurity and law enforcement, but it is incremental as it applies existing crime script analysis to a new fraud type.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding 'eWhoring', a new type of online fraud, by analyzing over 6,500 posts from an underground forum to describe its business model and identify potential interventions.
In this paper, we describe a new type of online fraud, referred to as 'eWhoring' by offenders. This crime script analysis provides an overview of the 'eWhoring' business model, drawing on more than 6,500 posts crawled from an online underground forum. This is an unusual fraud type, in that offenders readily share information about how it is committed in a way that is almost prescriptive. There are economic factors at play here, as providing information about how to make money from 'eWhoring' can increase the demand for the types of images that enable it to happen. We find that sexualised images are typically stolen and shared online. While some images are shared for free, these can quickly become 'saturated', leading to the demand for (and trade in) more exclusive 'packs'. These images are then sold to unwitting customers who believe they have paid for a virtual sexual encounter. A variety of online services are used for carrying out this fraud type, including email, video, dating sites, social media, classified advertisements, and payment platforms. This analysis reveals potential interventions that could be applied to each stage of the crime commission process to prevent and disrupt this crime type.