Measuring eWhoring
View / Open Files
Publication Date
2019Journal Title
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
Conference Name
ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC)
ISBN
9781450369480
Publisher
ACM
Type
Conference Object
This Version
AM
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Pastrana, S., Hutchings, A., Thomas, D., & Tapiador, J. (2019). Measuring eWhoring. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC https://doi.org/10.1145/3355369.3355597
Abstract
eWhoring is the term used by offenders to refer to a type of online fraud in which cybersexual encounters are simulated for financial gain. Perpetrators use social engineering techniques to impersonate young women in online communities, e.g., chat or social networking sites. They engage potential customers in conversation with the aim of selling misleading sexual material – mostly photographs and interactive video shows – illicitly compiled from third-party sites. eWhoring is a popular topic in underground communities, with forums acting as a gateway into offending. Users not only share knowledge and tutorials, but also trade in goods and services, such as packs of images and videos. In this paper, we present a processing pipeline to quantitatively analyse various aspects of eWhoring. Our pipeline integrates multiple tools to crawl, annotate, and classify material in a semi-automatic way. It builds in precautions to safeguard against significant ethical issues, such as avoiding the researchers’ exposure to pornographic material, and legal concerns, which were justified as some of the images were classified as child exploitation material. We use it to perform a longitudinal measurement of eWhoring activities in 10 specialised underground forums from 2008 to 2019. Our study focuses on three of the main eWhoring components: (i) the acquisition and provenance of images; (ii) the financial profits and monetisation techniques; and (iii) a social network analysis of the offenders, including their relationships, interests, and pathways before and after engaging in this fraudulent activity. We provide recommendations, including potential intervention approaches.
Sponsorship
This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [grant number EP/M020320/1], by MINECO (grant TIN2016-79095-C2-2-R), and by the Comunidad de Madrid (P2018/TCS-4566, co-financed by European Structural Funds ESF and FEDER).
Funder references
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/M020320/1)
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3355369.3355597
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/297282
Rights
Licence:
http://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved
Statistics
Total file downloads (since January 2020). For more information on metrics see the
IRUS guide.