Establishing and Studying Networks of Nigerians Criminal Behavior Patterns

Abstract

Examining the architecture of criminal social networks can deliver con- siderable understanding of these communities’ organizational structure, highlighting elements like their size and degree of centralization. Although similar examinations have been undertaken previously, our study cen- tered on generating a large-scale social graph utilizing a limited amount of leaked data, specifically criminal email addresses, from Nigerian offend- ers. We initiated our research by formulating a social graph encompassing 43 thousand nodes, sourced from one thousand publicly exposed Nigerian criminal email addresses. This was achieved by pinpointing Facebook pro- files linked to these email addresses and extracting the publicly available social graph from these profiles. We subsequently conducted an extensive analysis of this social graph to identify prominent criminal profiles, or- ganized criminal groups, and wide-ranging criminal communities. In the end, we performed a manual review of these profiles, unearthing numer- ous public Facebook groups with a criminal focus. This study underlines the considerable volume of information that can be extracted even from minimal data leaks.