USING AI IN COMPLIANCE TO FIND TARGETS THAT DON'T POST ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Six years ago, back in 2017, I explored in an article how America law enforcement agencies were already using artificial intelligence to gather information on individuals who were not users of social media, or even on the Internet for one reason or another, be they criminals, terrorists, or corrupt Politically Exposed Persons. See Using Social Media to Create Shadow Profiles in Investigations. There are some valuable lessons for compliance in 2023 contained in that article.

Compliance officers tasked with operating Customer Identification Programs (CIP) should be aware that some career criminals, as well as the money launderers who assist them, intentionally stay off social media, as well as other cyberspace tools, to deny law enforcement any information regarding their activities, to hinder any possible profiling during possible investigations in progress. That is a standard operating procedure which they adhere to, to protect themselves as they go about their career criminal lives. 

To counter this technique law enforcement uses AI to plumb social media sites of all possible associates, activities they may have been involved in, even incidentally, public or charitable events where they may have attended, even remote or indirect relationships which might result in relevant information, no matter how small. Compliance officers performing CIP should follow their lead, by using AI platforms that employ machine learning (ML) to explore known associates and activities, which ML will leverage into new territory and material, assembling information previously totally unconnected with your target.

Law enforcement uses this exact technique to build information on gang members who are not even on social media, or computer literate, through an AI-powered search, starting with as little as one known associate, or known location of social interaction. As a compliance officer, you can employ the same tradecraft, and obtain results, by focusing your system on the links you already have, and unleashing your ML capability to take your inquiry farther than your legacy system could ever go in the past; Happy hunting.