What are the dynamics of online marketplaces and forums that support or undermine the criminal economic ecosystem?
Background
Alongside the more specific categories for further research, there are some cross-cutting themes where the research questions and gaps are relevant across economic crime as a whole.
This includes how best to understand and respond to the threat as technology develops quickly. For example, how might this technology development influence the response required. There are also gaps in the best research methods to understand economic crime as a whole; for example, around best identification and utilisation of suitable data sources.
Finally, horizon scanning is crucial to maintaining sight of how the threat may evolve and how best to prepare for mitigating that in the future.
Next steps
Get in touch with NECC-IF-Research@nca.gov.uk EconomicCrimeResearch@homeoffice.gov.uk
Source
This question was published as part of the set of ARIs in this document:
Economic Crime Areas of Research Interest ARI report July 2025 1
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Related UKRI funded projects
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How Online Technologies are Transforming Transnational Organised Crime (Cyber-TNOC)
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Why might this be relevant?
The project specifically addresses the dynamics of online marketplaces and forums in relation to criminal economic ecosystems.
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CybercrimeNLP (CC-NLP): A natural language processing toolkit for the interdisciplinary analysis of underground online forums
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The project focuses on natural language processing for analyzing underground online forums, which is related to criminal activities but does not directly address the dynamics of online marketplaces in the criminal economic ecosystem.
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FinTech digital solution to prevent online payments to criminal traders
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Why might this be relevant?
The project offers a FinTech solution to prevent online payments to criminal traders, which is related to criminal economic activities but does not directly address the dynamics of online marketplaces in the criminal economic ecosystem.