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That thing we tell you to do, and never show you how to do it? Critical thinking is all about context. For example, take the Marvel cinematic universe. I promise I’m not obsessed about this even though I’ve mentioned it quite a lot. Critical thinking starts with a ‘what is’ question. What is Marvel Studios? It is in a basic sense just a successful film and TV production studio with some really good IP. Simple. But that does not explain its dominance and reach. I hope I am not being unfair when I say that impacts can not be justified by the artistic quality of the work. I enjoyed many of the films and TV shows, however a fair assessment would be that their succession depends on qualities beyond artistic elan and the craftsmanship on display.
Why do I say that harsh thing? I feel I am justified because the most critically well received elements of the MCU are not necessarily its most commercially successful. So we have a puzzle. Maybe the critics are wrong and they miss the appeal. Or, the audience is wrong. Am I out of touch? No: it’s the public who are at fault. Or, we have to look at other qualities that drive the success of the MCU. Critical and commercial success could be not only decoupled, but in opposition. Many commentators have made the point I’m going to make.
I believe that the impact of it relies on its very successful integration of storied IP, regular pace of output, and output tailored to the widest demographic, which produces an unrivalled capacity to shape its own audience and taste culture. When you look at how it works though, it is really a massive and well honed content generation system. We can pull out the significant qualities here. One that is integrated across different media – TV, games, other tie-ins. That explains a lot about the content producers. The films have to make a lot of money back. So we have to appeal to an audience beyond fans of the comic characters.
Whenever I watch one I’m always confused about who is doing what. Why is Thanos angry? The films are designed so that does not matter so much. You can still enjoy Thor or Wonder Woman without knowing very much about the backstory. Good guy/gal thumps bad guy, but in a knowing way. They also include enough so that if you do care about the backstory you will enjoy the fan service going on. Some of the TV shows are meant to be more niche. If you care about Loki then you will be satisfied with his own spinoff show. That is why the films always full of supporting characters and jokes regularly every few minutes. They are entertainment, of a particular type.
Maybe I am wrong about that and in fact once you reach a certain level of a success the product is so much in the cultural atmosphere that you do not have to worry about backstory. I think that the interesting question is how did we get from a situation where comic books and Spider-Man and so on were seen as rather childish, nerdy and a bit weird. Consider the character of Comic Book Guy in the Simpsons. We are meant to find his obsessions a bit sad and funny. Now they are accepted as part of the culture. They are cultural events in themselves. They are so accepted that to look down on them is seen as a dreadful faux pas.
It is notable that this is very different in terms of cultural product from those examined by Bourdieu in his work on taste. There is little in the way of class distinction or self positioning to be drawn by liking or not liking The Avengers. The CGI-led films are well beyond such considerations. And if you critique the current content of one you are pretty much critiquing the content of all of them. It explains why for example the gender politics of them are rather bland and agreeable, and why there is little geopolitical content.
Compare the 1990s films of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those films were heavily invested in the geopolitical context of the time. They featured Middle Eastern terrorists, and a genuine clear sense of what masculinity was in opposition to feminine qualities. Non-American characters tended to appear only as sweaty-ass terrorists. I mean literally. They were always covered in sweat to make them look more shifty. As if the filmmakers were not confident that we might as an audience get the sense that they were bad guys just because they were terrorists and needed extra guidance in that.
Why does the MCU not do the same thing and have The Avengers solving the Middle East crisis or bumping Putin on the head?
The reason is that if you take sides in any sense in these contemporary conflicts you’re losing your audience. And also the audience does not really want to be reminded of these intractable and difficult human conflicts. The MCU cannot tell us much about taste culture it count on us quite a bit about the cultural moment we are in. As an aside I didn’t want to make too much of this distinction. Schwarzenegger did not always play it straight and plenty of his films The MCU cannot tell us much about taste culture it can’t always quite a bit about the cultural moment we are in. As an aside I didn’t want to make too much of this distinction. Schwarzenegger did not always play it straight and plenty of his films have a raised eyebrow and self-awareness. Perhaps for the same reasons. Perhaps for the same reasons the MCU does. I want to say here there appears to be an inverse relationship between artistic quality and scale. My very favourite Schwarzenegger film is TheTerminator, a fairly small budget and quite dark film about a robot assassin and a feature apocalypse. Terminator 2: This Time It’s CGI is a much bigger film and was rather more cheery about the future, and also please to a wider demographic. The first film was very adult, the second much more youth and child or young adult focused.
We have established that Hollywood studios productions relates to the cultural moment and the audience. However the MCU is a good study because it does not just reach its demographic, it shapes and moulds it. The MCU generates taste. It does not simply respond to them out, it makes it. Some of that is in a very straightforward material way. Ensuring most cinema screens are booked out for your big launch means there isn’t much else to say. Another is creating an identity for you audience. When the Terminator was released there was no concept of a young adult audience. Now however there are films, books and much more aimed at a young adult audience. The Hunger Games is a fantastic example of what that is like when it’s very successful in its own terms. There might be another argument related to the turbulent times we live in. And it is that this is what audiences want. Perhaps a break from intractable political polarisation into a self-contained universe where the baddies get repeatedly punched in the face, but not too seriously, is very very welcome. And I can hardly blame anyone for that.
A further critical point that we can draw on here is about how academics talk about consumption of culture we tend to look at why culture is consumed, but not the content. Which is maybe a bit strange. We act as if distinction and other judgements are content independent. So say the audience that consumes opera could just as easily be concerning basketball. I do not think that is true. The MCU is a great example of how cultural functions and taste culture and content work together.
… Otherwise they would not actually be institutions at all. That is basically what an institution is, as opposed to a temporary association or social movement.
I was trying to think through some irritation at the tendency of leaderships to just make changes that are very in the moment and focused on firefighting political controversies. I work in an ancient Scottish university and feel we have obligations to preserve the spirit and sacred traditions handed down to us, those of the Scottish Enlightenment. So I wanted to work through my sense of why this is an issue for me.
There has been a tendency recently for institutions to simply respond to the cultural moment rather than look beyond it. To some extent this is quite natural because, as I keep trying to remind everyone, institutions are just people. When people complain about the media or about social media or about Westminster or Hollyrood or the university it is good to bear that in mind. The University is just us. Elites are just folk, but with special, lizardy qualities.
Yet institutions are still something more than that, through the processes, cultures and practices that they embed. Many of the people occupying institutions are quite practised and skilled but naturally they are going to have blindspots. We can examine these topics systematically using Weber’s theories of bureaucracy. So although we can say that institutions are composed of people, they are not people who have entirely free latitude to do what ever they wan. Systems are built to create sanctions, rewards and status. We cannot break the rules willy-nilly. When we do as we find out the reasons why people would want it the rules in place. For example consistency could be valued over individual flexibility. One would probably want that in and airline, or an army. Rather more flexibility could be hoped for in a GP. But not too much. We can also point to their problems that we know emerge in any institution. There are problems of perverse incentives, ends-means displacement and other well-known problems of bureaucracies.
The popularity of algorithmic governance has meant that some of these qualities are now universal in the data infrastructure. For example the problem of performativity, where is the model becomes the aim. But this should not be treated as mysterious. In the case of Facebook the problems identified in terms of polarisation are parts of the business model. They are not a great mystery and we can mislead ourselves with an in-the-moment focus on the technology rather than the human-level decisions taken about the business it undergirds.
But the whole reason for being part of an institution is it gives you access to collective resources beyond yourselves. The reason we sometimes get a little bit testy about this tradition is that our traditions and maybe be hidebound and dated, or they may be part of this collective resources. You cannot always tell. Our ability to tell which is which is inversely related to our confidence in the doing that. So we need to have a learning process that is fairly reliable and self-correcting. Otherwise another problem sets in, that of path dependence. When you start going in one direction it is very hard to turn off.
At the current moment there is growing concern about the role of digital systems in creating and furthering ‘harm’ across a range of domains (Powell, Stratton, and Cameron 2018). What harm means is often taken as read, or left to subjective claims. There is, or should be, fundamental disagreement as to what these harms are and how to assess and address them (Aldridge, Stevens, and Barratt 2018; Martin 2018). Often it is taken as read that people reposting COVID origin theories is a harm without showing any harmful effect. The concept has a tendency to expand and it needs to be confined. I characterise it as activity that has an objectively negative effect on human wellbeing and liberty.
There are identifiable vectors. Complex networked systems facilitate existing criminal activity and create new vectors for disinformation and exploitation that are not easily predicted and which do not avail themselves of technologically determined securitised resolutions (Henry and Flynn 2020). Geopolitical turbulence adds to intersecting harms that derive from the coming together of digital systems, online communities and markets, convergences between crime types and criminal actors, extremist ideologies and authoritarian states (Lavorgna 2023; Picarelli 2006).
There is a sense of these developments as having effects beyond the reach of human intention, for example, tendencies built into the digitised illicit drug market system that may mean more risky drug distribution patterns emerge (Bancroft 2023). Along with that we are facing a novel reorganisation of criminal activity along principles in line with the digital economy such as the rise of the ‘crimfluencer’ and the use of app-based data driven labour models by romance fraud organisations, shoplifters and ransomware gangs (Meland, Bayoumy, and Sindre 2020).
Alongside novelty we also see well known human motivations recurring in these spaces, whether status competition (Holt 2020), transgressive thrills (Abbink and Sadrieh 2009), self-justification (Offei et al. 2022) and economic gain (Moeller, Munksgaard, and Demant 2017). Researchers have unprecedented access to internal and external communications (Vu et al. 2021) where they can look in detail at practices such as altercasting or identity imposition (Dickinson and Wang 2023), governance (Pereda and Décary-Hetu 2023), geographical patterning (Demant et al. 2018), and risk management (Bilgrei 2019), and also apply theoretically informed framings such as gender (Fleetwood, Aldridge, and Chatwin 2020) and low resource bricolage (Rai 2019). Underlying these disparate changes is the concept of the hybrid, used to describe new technosocial formations of criminal activity and governance that combine the human and the non-human (Brown 2006), online and offline action (Roks, Leukfeldt, and Densley 2021), and different technological systems operating on countervailing principles (Moeller 2022; Tzanetakis and South 2023).
The approach I take is interdisciplinary grey zone criminology. My first point is that rather than taking place predominantly in digital ‘black spots’, cybercrime works along with the digital reordering of societies (Smith 2016). The grey zone mixes the self-interested and the ideological, the harmful and the beneficial (Munksgaard and Demant 2016). For example, Telegram is used by the Russian FSB as a mass propaganda vector but also provides valuable space for dissidents and refugees, for harm reduction advice and mutual support (Sawicka, Rafanell, and Bancroft 2022). Second, these times present a challenge for existing criminological frameworks and policing operations. They demand new methodological and theoretical approaches that can integrate insights from zemiology, data science, interactionist sociology, cyberpsychology, design informatics, and other spheres of thought.
I want to take these threats seriously but move us past the current tendency to discursive doomscrolling, and provide a framework for analysing them in human scale terms, drawing on a range of work that has sought to reframe technologically enabled harms as having a complex multi-layered reality that involves but is not reducible to specific system affordances (Wood 2021). I propose the following features are significant in these systems, which I set out here. First, they have scaleability. Digital systems allow for a rapid growth in numbers and lower barriers to new entrants, for example, through crime as a service and the use of AI (Kramer et al. 2023). They have transferability and reciprocity between zones, for example, white supremacist ideologies are in fact highly adaptable discursive constructs which are easily transferred to local geopolitical contexts (Allchorn 2020). They have mutually reinforcing effects – systems encourage, legitimate and reward harmful action through methods such as meme cultures and celebration of particular cases (Kingdon 2021). Finally they are tangible – digital ubiquity means this activity involves and effects people in their homes, at work, and at play.
Readings
Abbink, Klaus, and Abdolkarim Sadrieh. 2009. ‘The Pleasure of Being Nasty’. Economics Letters 105(3):306–8.
Aldridge, Judith, Alex Stevens, and Monica J. Barratt. 2018. ‘Will Growth in Cryptomarket Drug Buying Increase the Harms of Illicit Drugs?’ Addiction 113(5):789–96. doi: 10.1111/add.13899.
Allchorn, William. 2020. ‘Cumulative Extremism and the Online Space: Reciprocal Radicalisation Effects Between the Extreme Right and Radical Islamists in the UK’. Pp. 37–62 in Digital Extremisms: Readings in Violence, Radicalisation and Extremism in the Online Space, Palgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity, edited by M. Littler and B. Lee. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Bancroft, Angus. 2019a. ‘Research in Fractured Digital Spaces’. International Journal of Drug Policy 73:288–92. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.05.007.
Bancroft, Angus. 2019b. The Darknet and Smarter Crime: Methods for Investigating Criminal Entrepreneurs and the Illicit Drug Economy. Springer Nature.
Bancroft, Angus. 2023. ‘“Waiting for the Delivery Man”: Temporalities of Addiction, Withdrawal, and the Pleasures of Drug Time in a Darknet Cryptomarket’. Pp. 61–72 in Digital Transformations of Illicit Drug Markets: Reconfiguration and Continuity, Emerald Studies in Death and Culture, edited by M. Tzanetakis and N. South. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Bilgrei, Ola Røed. 2019. ‘Community-Consumerism: Negotiating Risk in Online Drug Communities’. Sociology of Health & Illness 41(5):852–66. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12864.
Brown, Sheila. 2006. ‘The Criminology of Hybrids: Rethinking Crime and Law in Technosocial Networks’. Theoretical Criminology 10(2):223–44. doi: 10.1177/1362480606063140.
Demant, Jakob, Rasmus Munksgaard, David Décary-Hétu, and Judith Aldridge. 2018. ‘Going Local on a Global Platform: A Critical Analysis of the Transformative Potential of Cryptomarkets for Organized Illicit Drug Crime’. International Criminal Justice Review 28(3):255–74. doi: 10.1177/1057567718769719.
Dickinson, Timothy, and Fangzhou Wang. 2023. ‘Neutralizations, Altercasting, and Online Romance Fraud Victimizations’. CrimRxiv.
Fleetwood, Jennifer, Judith Aldridge, and Caroline Chatwin. 2020. ‘Gendering Research on Online Illegal Drug Markets’. Addiction Research & Theory 28(6):457–66. doi: 10.1080/16066359.2020.1722806.
Henry, Nicola, and Asher Flynn. 2020. ‘Image-Based Sexual Abuse: A Feminist Criminological Approach’. Pp. 1109–30 in The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance, edited by T. J. Holt and A. M. Bossler. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Holt, Thomas J. 2020. ‘Computer Hacking and the Hacker Subculture’. Pp. 725–42 in The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance, edited by T. J. Holt and A. M. Bossler. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Kingdon, Ashton. 2021. ‘The Meme Is the Method: Examining the Power of the Image Within Extremist Propaganda’. Pp. 301–22 in Researching Cybercrimes: Methodologies, Ethics, and Critical Approaches, edited by A. Lavorgna and T. J. Holt. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Kramer, Jo-Anne, Arjan A. J. Blokland, Edward R. Kleemans, and Melvin R. J. Soudijn. 2023. ‘Money Laundering as a Service: Investigating Business-like Behavior in Money Laundering Networks in the Netherlands’. Trends in Organized Crime. doi: 10.1007/s12117-022-09475-w.
Lavorgna, Anita. 2023. ‘Unpacking the Political-Criminal Nexus in State-Cybercrimes: A Macro-Level Typology’. Trends in Organized Crime. doi: 10.1007/s12117-023-09486-1.
Meland, Per Håkon, Yara Fareed Fahmy Bayoumy, and Guttorm Sindre. 2020. ‘The Ransomware-as-a-Service Economy within the Darknet’. Computers & Security 92:101762. doi: 10.1016/j.cose.2020.101762.
Moeller, Kim. 2022. ‘Hybrid Governance in Online Drug Distribution’. Contemporary Drug Problems 49(4):491–504. doi: 10.1177/00914509221101212.
Moeller, Kim, Rasmus Munksgaard, and Jakob Demant. 2017. ‘Flow My FE the Vendor Said: Exploring Violent and Fraudulent Resource Exchanges on Cryptomarkets for Illicit Drugs’. American Behavioral Scientist early online(v). doi: 10.1177/0002764217734269.
Munksgaard, Rasmus, and Jakob Demant. 2016. ‘Mixing Politics and Crime–the Prevalence and Decline of Political Discourse on the Cryptomarket’. International Journal of Drug Policy 35:77–83. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.04.021.
Offei, Martin, Francis Kofi Andoh-Baidoo, Emmanuel W. Ayaburi, and David Asamoah. 2022. ‘How Do Individuals Justify and Rationalize Their Criminal Behaviors in Online Romance Fraud?’ Information Systems Frontiers 24(2):475–91. doi: 10.1007/s10796-020-10051-2.
Pereda, Valentin, and David Décary-Hetu. 2023. ‘Illegal Market Governance and Organized Crime Groups’ Resilience: A Study of The Sinaloa Cartel’. The British Journal of Criminology azad027. doi: 10.1093/bjc/azad027.
Picarelli, John T. 2006. ‘The Turbulent Nexus Of Transnational Organised Crime And Terrorism: A Theory of Malevolent International Relations’. Global Crime 7(1):1–24. doi: 10.1080/17440570600650125.
Powell, Anastasia, Gregory Stratton, and Robin Cameron. 2018. Digital Criminology: Crime and Justice in Digital Society. Routledge.
Rai, Amit S. 2019. Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India. Duke University Press.
Roks, Robert A., E. Rutger Leukfeldt, and James A. Densley. 2021. ‘The Hybridization of Street Offending in the Netherlands’. The British Journal of Criminology 61(4):926–45. doi: 10.1093/bjc/azaa091.
Sawicka, Maja, Irene Rafanell, and Angus Bancroft. 2022. ‘Digital Localisation in an Illicit Market Space: Interactional Creation of a Psychedelic Assemblage in a Darknet Community of Exchange’. International Journal of Drug Policy 100:103514. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2021.103514.
Smith, Benjamin T. 2016. ‘Public Drug Policy and Grey Zone Pacts in Mexico, 1920–1980’. Pp. 33–51 in Drug Policies and the Politics of Drugs in the Americas, edited by B. C. Labate, C. Cavnar, and T. Rodrigues. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Stevens, Alex. 2020. ‘Critical Realism and the “Ontological Politics of Drug Policy”’. International Journal of Drug Policy 102723. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102723.
Tzanetakis, Meropi, and Nigel South. 2023. ‘Introduction: The Digital Transformations of Illicit Drug Markets as a Process of Reconfiguration and Continuity’. Pp. 1–12 in Digital Transformations of Illicit Drug Markets: Reconfiguration and Continuity, Emerald Studies in Death and Culture, edited by M. Tzanetakis and N. South. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Vu, Anh V., Lydia Wilson, Yi Ting Chua, Ilia Shumailov, and Ross Anderson. 2021. ‘ExtremeBB: Enabling Large-Scale Research into Extremism, the Manosphere and Their Correlation by Online Forum Data’. ArXiv Preprint ArXiv:2111.04479. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2111.04479.
Wood, Mark A. 2021. ‘Rethinking How Technologies Harm’. The British Journal of Criminology 61(3):627–47. doi: 10.1093/bjc/azaa074.
One of the ways in which trust is signalled in criminal groups is the fact of having been in prison. It is a signal that is costly and hard to fake. The better the system is at punishing the guilty, the cleaner the signal. Therefore in order to disrupt the signal, imprisoning innocent people would make criminals unsure of who they could trust. It might occur to you that the criminal justice system does a good job of this already. In Brazil, as in other states, this effect is observable. The more punitive the state, the more efficiently it centralises criminal governance in the prison system itself. It does that by bringing criminals into the prisons where wayward individuals can be controlled by the very gangs who are building their power in there.
The nature of the prison trust signal came up in Lessing and Willis (2019) fascinating analysis of the criminal governance produced by the Brazilian prison based drug trafficking organisation, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). Drug traffickers, once the footloose entrepreneurs of the crime trade, are becoming central to criminal governance. In much the way that mafias used to extend their influence beyond their members to the communities and polities they infest, drug trafficking organisations are now becoming originators and practitioners of governance forms and challenges to state authority. That represents a change in the way the drug trade is run, and a source of innovation in criminal forms. One of the developments that interest us is the growing role of the prison gang.
The PCC’s power is remarkable in terms of its reach. Originating in São Paulo in 1993 in response to a prison massacre the previous year it now commands 29,000 members. It does this without using the typical cartel model which tightly intergrates organisation and turf. Criminal organisations prefer themselves to be the ones wielding violence and the PCC is apparently responsible for a notable decline in homicides in territory it controls. Lessing and Willis draw attention to how successfully the PCC has managed this process. It ensures payments are received, consignments are delivered, competition encouraged and managed, using relatively limited punishment and retaliation. It achieves legitimacy in its sphere of operation. Competition is a core tool to maintain this.
The PCC operates using credit based drug consignments, payment to come after delivery. Profits go into communal benefits for members. Punishments are clearly defined and limiting. Well maintained records and an emphasis on proceder (right conduct) support this rationalist paradigm. While some individual criminal operators and groups rely on a reputation for unpredictability and extremism of their response to generate an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty they exploit, the PCC relits on predictable, recoverable internal ‘justice’ to govern its associates. One of the collective benefits it provides for members is security, within prisons and without. Punishments are in the main stigmatising suspensions from the trade.
Lessing B and Willis GD (2019) Legitimacy in Criminal Governance: Managing a Drug Empire from Behind Bars. The American Political Science Review 113(2). Washington, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press: 584–606. DOI: 10.1017/S0003055418000928.
Sharing some short and long essay questions from my course on illicit markets and criminal organisations particularly for other teachers but also to help students in how they go about selecting a question to answer.
The short essay is either a guided book review, where the student examines the essay question through a book I have suggested, or an invitation to conduct their own analysis of a creative work. The aim is to get them thinking about how different texts are created in relation to the topic and get them used to evaluating theory, method and findings. I found when discussing them with students that the police crime as organised crime sparked a lot of interest but was a big challenge. To answer the question required the student to assimilate a lot of background from that period of critical criminology and almost come up with their own theory. It was a lot to ask in a short essay. The Rahman reading also generated some interest and provided a more contained take for them to dive into.
Discuss the relationship between masculinity and organised crime’s ‘street habitus’ using Rahman M (2019) Homicide and Organised Crime: Ethnographic Narratives of Serious Violence in the Criminal Underworld. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-16253-5. See Chapter 5 for the discussion of habitus.
Discuss the implications of framing organised crime as a ‘political economy’ using Wright A (2005) Organised Crime: Concepts, Cases, Controls. Cullompton: Willan Publishing.
Should we consider police crime as organised crime? In what terms? Use Box S (1984) Power, Crime and Mystification. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
Should our research agenda be focused on ‘global crime’ or ‘global harm’? Use Hall T and Scalia V (2019) A Research Agenda for Global Crime. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.
What are the benefits and limits of studing transnational crime in terms of global ‘black spots’? Use Brown SS and Hermann MG (2020) Transnational Crime and Black Spots – Rethinking Sovereignty and the Global Economy. Palgrave Macmillan.
How does debt shape people’s involvement in the illicit economy? Use Schuster CE (2015) Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy. Univ of California Press.
Critically examine the concept of ‘flow’ used in Savona EU, Guerette RT and Aziani A (eds.) (2022) The Evolution of Illicit Flows: Displacement and Convergence among Transnational Crime. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-95301-0.
Discuss the problem of ‘concept creep’ in criminological analysis and discourse, using Densley J, McLean R and Brick C (2023) Contesting County Lines: Case Studies in Drug Crime and Deviant Entrepreneurship. Policy Press.
Discuss how organised crime is socially embedded and the uses and limits of the organised crime trope, using Hobbs D (2013) Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Using a theme from the course, write a criminological interpretation of a work of fiction or other type of creative work such as a film, game or television series. For an example of how this could be done see: Ruggiero V (2002) Moby Dick and the Crimes of the Economy. British Journal of Criminology 42(1): 96–108 or Daly SE (ed.) (2021) Theories of Crime Through Popular Culture. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-54434-8.
Long essays are more thematic/research focused, and are intended to encourage a deep dive into a puzzle or problem. There were three broad question types here. First, do we characterise this field in the right way, theoretically? The question on rational actor theory is an example of this. Second, what empirical evidence can we bring to bear on this problem and is in enough? The county lines question invites this approach. Third, here is some data – see what you can do with it. The question on prison markets does that. The intention in each question is to allow students to take risks and also give them some direction or a bit of a safety net.
1. What are the implications and limitations of understanding participants in illicit markets as ‘rational actors’?
Bancroft A (2019) The Darknet and Smarter Crime: Methods for Investigating Criminal Entrepreneurs and the Illicit Drug Economy. Springer Nature. Chapter 6 ‘Cybercrime Is Not Always Rational, but It Is Reasonable’
Childs A, Coomber R and Bull M (2020) Do Online Illicit Drug Market Exchanges Afford Rationality?: Contemporary Drug Problems 47(4). SAGE PublicationsSage CA: Los Angeles, CA. DOI: 10.1177/0091450920934186.
Morselli C (2001) Structuring Mr. Nice: entrepreneurial opportunities and brokerage positioning in the cannabis trade. Crime, Law and Social Change 35(3): 203–244.
Pearson G and Hobbs D (2003) King pin? A case study of a middle market drug broker. The howard journal of criminal justice 42(4): 335–347.
3. What is the relationship, if any, between organised crime and cybercrime? What are the benefits and limits of understanding cybercrime in these terms?
6. What are the cultures and politics of technology in digital crime?
Mantello P (2016) The machine that ate bad people: The ontopolitics of the precrime assemblage. Big Data & Society 3(2): 2053951716682538. DOI: 10.1177/2053951716682538.
7. Using examples, discuss the role of technology in the evolution of illicit markets and/or organised criminal activity
Edlund L and Machado C (2019) It’s the Phone, Stupid: Mobiles and Murder. w25883, May. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. DOI: 10.3386/w25883.
9. Discuss the benefits and limits of cultural explanations for crime. As part of this, discuss the relationship between organised crime and social taboo.
Ferrell J, Hayward K and Young J (2015) Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. Second Edition. 55 City Road, London. DOI: 10.4135/9781473919969.
Holt TJ (2020) Computer Hacking and the Hacker Subculture. In: Holt TJ and Bossler AM (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 725–742. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-78440-3_31.
Collier, B., Clayton, R., Thomas, D., Hutchings, A. (2020), Cybercrime is (often) boring: maintaining the infrastructure of cybercrime economies, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security
10. Discuss the intersection of sociological factors such as gender and race/ethnicity with the lived experience of participants in illicit markets and organised crime.
Gundur RV (2022) Trying to Make It: The Enterprises, Gangs, and People of the American Drug Trade. Cornell University Press. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv1xg5hhv (accessed 4 October 2022).
11. Using examples, critically examine the co-evolution of illicit markets/organisations and crime control
Lloyd D (2019) Human Trafficking in Supply Chains and the Way Forward. In: Winterdyk JA and Jones J (eds.) The Palgrave International Handbook of Human Trafficking. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 1–24. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-63192-9_50-1.
Savona EU, Guerette RT and Aziani A (eds.) (2022) The Evolution of Illicit Flows: Displacement and Convergence among Transnational Crime. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-95301-0.
12. Have markets made crime normative?
Alalehto T (2010) The wealthy white-collar criminals: corporations as offenders. Journal of Financial Crime 17(3). London, United Kingdom: Emerald Group Publishing Limited: 308–320. DOI: 10.1108/13590791011056273.
Farrall S and Karstedt S (2020) Respectable Citizens – Shady Practices: The Economic Morality of the Middle Classes / Stephen Farrall and Susanne Karstedt. Clarendon studies in criminology. Oxford: University Press.
Garrett BL (2014) Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations. Harvard University Press. DOI: 10.4159/9780674735712.
Wingerde K and Lord N (2019) The Elusiveness of White‐Collar and Corporate Crime in a Globalized Economy. In: Rorie ML (ed.) The Handbook of White‐Collar Crime. 1st ed. Wiley, pp. 469–483. DOI: 10.1002/9781118775004.ch29.
13. Using data we have shared in class write a crime script. As part of this discuss the advantages and limits of crime script analysis and the theory behind it, and the implications of the crime script you have designed.
14. Using data from the American Prison Writing archive, discuss how markets operate in prison. What roles are involved, how do goods and services circulate, and how is the market structured.
Crewe B (2006) Prison Drug Dealing and the Ethnographic Lens. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 45(4): 347–368. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2311.2006.00428.x.
Day MJ (2015) Learning from the Worst: The U.S. Prison System as a University of Destructive Utility. In: Mcelwee G and Smith R (eds.) Contemporary Issues in Entrepreneurship Research. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 203–226. DOI: 10.1108/S2040-724620150000005015.
Gundur, R. V. “The changing social organization of prison protection markets: When prisoners choose to organize horizontally rather than vertically.” Trends in Organized Crime (2018): 1-19.
Tompkins, Charlotte NE. ““There’s that many people selling it”: Exploring the nature, organisation and maintenance of prison drug markets in England.” Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy 23.2 (2016): 144-153.
15. Using examples, discuss how the cultural representation of organised crime and illicit markets has shaped policing and policy in this area.
Hobbs, Dick, and Georgios A. Antonopoulos. “‘Endemic to the species’: ordering the ‘other’via organised crime.” Global Crime 14.1 (2013): 27-51.
Rawlinson, Patricia. “Mafia, media and myth: Representations of Russian organised crime.” The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 37.4 (1998): 346-358.
A PhD applicant did me the service of sending a list of questions in advance to see if we would be a good fit. It was a fantastic idea which led to a focused and creative discussion. It got me thinking about all the questions that went unasked in various PhD supervisions I have had. I suggest that all potential and starting PhDs can ask this of their supervisors early on. It is a little like those pre-marriage courses the Catholic church runs for couples about to be cleaved, where they work out how long it will last. The aim is not to see if you are of one mind, but to set out what you expect of each other and of the PhD itself. A lot of trouble can be avoided then. I’ve adapted some of the questions here.
1. Why do you supervise PhDs? What do you get from doing it?
The first question is about where supervision fits in the supervisor’s conception of an academic life. It is central to what they think the PhD is. That can vary between disciplines and inviduals. A supervisor might see a PhD student as someone to work on their projects, in a lab model, an emerging colleague, or someone who will learn advanced skills and move into industry. As ever, when we ask questions of others these are really about ourselves. Why do I want to do a PhD? Where does it sit in my direction as a person?
2. How many PhDs are there in the department? What do they study? How do you work with them?
This is a good question to situate supervision in terms of the how you fit into the intellectual community you will be joining. It is important to understand how student and supervisor plan to communite, and whether the supervisor is a channel for students to meet each other. One of the best ways of learning is from being around people who know more than you, who are further on in the journey. Will the PhD have opportunities to do that?
3. How do you deal with hierarchy in the relationship?
First, by not pretending it isn’t there. Hierarchy informs most working relationships and is no bad thing. It is a bad thing if it’s unthinking, or hidden, or people pretend it does not exist when it does. It is not a bad thing when the senior person in the hierarchy looks out for those below them. I expect my PhD students to become experts in their own area and I will defer to them on their knowledge. I also expect students to understand that when I say ‘don’t do it like that’ or ‘you have to include this or that in your writing’ that I am saying this because that is how you do a PhD and they will come a cropper if they do not defer to me on that. Much better to get the tough stuff out there early on.
4. How do deal with problems and conflicts?
I like this one because it is a bit of a challenge. Conflicts should not be expected but can arise in any working relationship and it is best to be open about that. And sometimes differences cannot be directly resolved.
Setting out ground rules as in above does not mean you avoid difficulties or anything like that. It does allow you to start with a better idea of who each other are and what you want out of the working relationship.
Then there are questions to ask yourself. There are the obvious ones – what do I want to find out about, how do I want to do it – and the existential ones, like why am I doing a PhD? What do I wnat to get from it? These will guide you in the choices you make.
The aim of this post is to provide a work in progress demo of how using titles for your paragraphs can structure your writing. The idea is that each paragraph has a named purpose in bold. I remove these before submitting the article. The titles add up to a narrative for the paper and so help structure what each part does.
A darknet vendor of forged dollars and their community: a distributed community of illicit practice
Abstract
The aim of this article is to understand a particular kind of criminal association which allows for cooperation and evaluation of a shared crime script and that functions as a distributed community of illicit practice. This article presents a crime script analysis of a darknet cryptomarket based counterfeit currency vendor and their community, putting the script into a technical-material context. It outlines the two interlinked crime scripts covering the last two stages of the counterfeit currency distribution system, for the currency vendor and middleman, ‘Benjamin’, and the buyer who will use the currency. The discussion forum allows each script to be fine tuned and creates feedback for the vendor on the quality and effectiveness of the notes. The online community is critical to the distribution of the notes and to their effective use. It forms a learning infrastructure, promotes semi-professional performances and evaluates risk. Counterfeit cash use is both a rationally structured crime, and an expressive one.
Introduction: Community developed modus operandi
What the study does: This paper describes the final stages of a counterfeit currency distribution network operating using a Tor darknet cryptomarket, covering the phase from secondary distribution to retail use. Cryptomarkets have gained prominence as novel market infrastructures primarily for the distribution of illicit drugs (Barratt and Aldridge 2016). The cryptomarket is shown to function as the ‘last mile’ distributor (Dittus, Wright, and Graham 2017) of counterfeit currency to buyers who will use it in the field, either individually or in tandem with an organised group. The case shows an example of a functioning supply chain from producer to final user and demonstrates how the darknet functions as both a distribution mechanism for the product and a learning environment for distributor and users, where they share user defined crime scripts for the successful use of counterfeit currency. The paper focuses on the process by which users develop and test effective crime scripts, what it tells about their priorities, their accounts of motive, and how they position themselves in relation to the wider illicit economy. It theorises the particular kind of criminal association involved as a distributed community of illicit practice, where networks are anonymous and temporary but effective in assessing the technical value of counterfeit notes and the practical risks and challenges involved in their use.
Suggest an audience: Counterfeiting is tackled by a range of bodies including the specialist policing taskforces such as the UK National Crime Agency Central Office for the Suppression of Counterfeit Currency and Protected Coins, central banks, and retailer/banking business organisations . Why it matters: Forged currency involves immediate risks to those handling the notes and longer term potential harms in damaging trust in the cash economy. There is a concentration of harm among frontline staff and smaller businesses. Cashiers or waiting staff who unwittingly handle fake notes might have their wages docked or be prosecuted. Smaller businesses which handle more cash will likewise be more at risk. It damages trust and costs are socialised to the rest of the economy. The most cash dependent demographic in society is also the part of the population that has least access to banking systems and credit and are most reliant on cash for paying and being paid (Lupo-Pasini 2021). As economies become more digitised and cash is steadily squeezed out of mainstream payment processes the harm of counterfeiting is increasingly concentrated among the more marginalized groups. Concerted efforts to tackle counterfeiting by reducing dependence on cash and actively targeting counterfeiting does not improve their position nor create alternative routes to finance for them. In fact it may have a damaging effect on the unbanked and technologically marginalised, particularly in developing country contexts (Wang 2020).
Get this in proportion: Currency counterfeiting is relatively uncommon. In 2003 the US Federal Reserve estimated that less than 1 in 10000 currency notes were counterfeit (Judson and Porter 2003), a result also reported for the Canadian dollar (Chant 2004) and estimated at 1 in 40,000 for the UK Pound Sterling (Bank of England 2022). Counterfeiting of the Indian Rupee is more common and appears to have been rising significantly from 2019 (Reserve Bank of India 2019, 2022). Money laundering through electronic means and crimes such as cheque fraud and card-not-present fraud are much more significant in terms of loss and in spreading corruption and funding the activities of organised criminal groups. Changes in the era of debt led/credit fuelled capitalism have further limited the opportunities for counterfeiting currency when more lucrative rewards lie in defrauding the banking sector (Kahn and Roberds 2008). Improved detection of fakes and improved note design have increased the technical demands on counterfeiters. Despite that there is still enough of an incentive for the practice to persist and even grow among some currencies such as the rupee, while there has in contrast been a decline in counterfeit euro circulation (European Central Bank 2021).
We should still care: Despite the challenges presented to counterfeiters, cash forgery persists. It evolves and shifts with the value put on various cash types and denominations, and the security/detection technology employed by central banks. Increasingly banknotes are designed as one element of a technological whole which encompasses surveillance, processing and detection technologies. The rise of automated processing points such as supermarket autopay terminals changes the process away from human detection. Machines can be designed to be more sensitive to particular aspects of the note such as precise weight or shape. These changed technological assemblages shift common understandings of what cash is in symbolic and practical terms, for example, from a store of capital to an object of value that can vary independently of its stated face value (Lemon 1998). Hinge – it’s a niche but an interesting one: However populations do at times return to cash. The growth in cash using during the pandemic also makes it likely that there are more opportunities for counterfeiting. Forgery may be beginning to matter more. At November 2021, US currency in circulation amounted to 2,116.4 US$ billion in seasonally adjusted figures, 9.9% of the M2 money supply (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve 2021). Despite the general move to digital payments, the cash supply has steadily grown throughout 2020/21 along with a broad increase in the money supply. The growth reflects central banks’ intervention in the economy under the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore cash continues to matter both as a technological system and one which has an evolving significance alongside its digital counterpart.
A theoretical postulate shows my contribution: Counterfeiting has a role in the crime business model. The main problem in maintaining the counterfeit currency economy is that to have any use value notes must circulate into the real economy quickly and in so doing are effectively nullified. They are detected and eliminated or become in any case useless to the criminals producing and using them. Criminals depend on the interface with the licit economy to wash fake notes into real money or goods. As a result the counterfeit economy is inherently parasitic on both the legal and illegal economies and is no way self sustaining, in contrast to for example the illicit drug market. Furthermore there a tension in the business model. To make the most from them counterfeit notes need to be of high value ($50 and $100) which are likely to attract more scrutiny when used. For lower denominations such as $10 or $20 many more transactions will have to take place to put them into use, raising the time and labour cost. Businesses learn from counterfeit ‘attacks’ and therefore are risky to hit more than once. All that makes it difficult to keep a counterfeit currency business going.
This is an interesting intersection: Counterfeit currency is characterised by many embedded techno-material factors such as the advent of desktop publishing and laser printing. The US Federal Reserve in 2003 note the cost of creating plausible counterfeits (Judson and Porter 2003). However distributed digitally enabled manufacturing appears to have brought some of the startup/fixed capital costs down (Li and Rocheteau 2011) and offset lithography can produce quality notes rapidly (NCA). Distribution is still very costly as they must be widely spread in order to be successful used. That may be an area where things have changed given the expansion in money mule and other distributed money laundering activity which lends itself more easily to counterfeit currency distribution. Therefore the counterfeit business has a number of challenges. It needs to maintain a throughput of users who can be upskilled to effectively make use of the product, be technologically adept, and has to manage the physical process of distribution. Second contribution I make: The paper takes the approach that counterfeit current distribution use is a rational and expressive form of techno-crime (Hayward 2007).. While one approach has been to analyse techno-crime as a modality (Van Nguyen 2021) I analyse it as a material context constitutive of criminal actors’ capacities. As technology is now so embedded we have to move past that and think of tech as part of the material matrix combining different technological forms and virtual and real world spaces.
The field make an effective case study because: Cryptomarkets are an effective part of that matrix. They are open, anonymous markets hosted using the Tor onion hosting service. Combined with bitcoin or another cryptocurrency payment system they allow goods to be sold in relative anonymity and without buyer and seller meeting. The seller posts a product listing and the buyer pays using a decentralised cryptocurrency which is held in market escrow. The package is sent to them through postal service, courier or dead drop. On receipt, or after a certain amount of time has elapsed, the payment is released to the seller. At least in theory that is the process, however increasingly sellers require payments immediately, showing how power shifts in a retail market towards the seller (Childs et al. 2020). The main meat of cryptomarkets is illicit drugs. The vast majority of the trades taking place are in illicit drugs. Despite the drug trade up to that point being cash heavy, a part of it was able to transfer to being a digitally mediated, remote business. Alongside drug markets, other trades existing, in for example malware, stolen goods, and counterfeit currency. Counterfeit currency is an example of a product which in theory could adapt well to cryptomarket distribution but that faces several conceptual and practical challenges in doing so.
Show direction: This article will examine the micro-process of last mile distribution and the interface between user purchase and practice. Research Questions this paper addresses:
What crime scripts are used by currency vendors and buyers?
How do counterfeit vendor and user make use of the technical/material qualities of the notes?
How does the social structure of the vendor-user relationship work with or against the CS?
How does counterfeit currency operate as part of its own technical assemblage
Method
Introduce the conceptual construct: the criminal community shares and tests the crime script against real world practice. Scripts are not wholly evolved and are going to be adapted all the time. The community closes the loop on that. The crime script consists of three basic stages prepare/pre-empt, doing/actualizing, end state/reset. It has to function as a whole set, a failure in one element cause the script to cease functioning. The crime script encapsulates the conditions for the act to occur, the preparation, entry/action and exit requirements and the post-condition. Dividing the script into its strategic and tactical components allows interventions to be planned which disrupt the criminal opportunity.
How the large case set links to the concept: Cryptomarkets are a place of ‘offender convergence’ (Felson 2006) characterized by ‘extended co-offending’ (Felson 2009), and they have some unique qualities as criminogenic spaces. Offenders can liaise and share intelligence and material without meeting. They provide a quality feedback loop where buyers discuss and compare products. They can be a testing ground for new products and new criminal business models. The particular cryptomarket hosting Benjamin is an open model. Anyone can join. Most goods and services can be offered, other than child pornography. Vendors may restrict customers according to location, willingness to spend, or a preexisting relationship.
The research design is constrained by the data: The project uses a single case study of a discussion between counterfeit dollar vendor and their customers. The discussion takes place over a long time period, allowing the evolving practice of both vendor and users to be followed. Mapping vendor and user crime scripts allowed me to systematise my understanding of their practice and develop a generalised outline of each players’ approach to executing their crime.
The paper makes a methodological contribution: Methodologically, the paper addresses a challenge of criminological research with dispersed entities, non-synchronous interactions, non-human. Draw on existing social research such as ethnography of infrastructures, multi-sited ethnography, hybrid ethnography ‘Material’ = : I analyse the technology used in material terms rather than as the crime medium. Beyond tech as a modality/fabric for crime and onto tech as a material context constitutive of actors.
Outline the general processof how I got here: Crime script analysis is a sequence analysis method of criminal knowledge formation. It follows four broad stages: Preparation – identification of opportunity and means. Assembly – putting the criminal into place, assembling the necessary precursors. Commission – the crime commission itself. Post-activity – getting away, extracting value, other necessary end states to reset the sequence (Chainey and Alonso Berbotto 2021). Each stage can be broken down into further elements depending on need. Dehghanniri and Borrion (2016) model the process to produce the crime script. The first step defines the problem, such as wage theft or dumping waste in the environment. It also shows what the crime script is intended to do which guides the analyst to the level of detail needed. An analysis that will be used in deploying surveillance will have different needs to one which seeks to change compliance rules. The second step elaborates the information requirements which flow from that: the analyst might be interested more in how this crime is committed, who is involved, and/or what facilitates it. The narrative analysis was key to allowing me to understand much more about how the script was developed and finessed by the group.
The specific process, neatly: The discussion was first open coded and then recoded according to the crime script stages for both the vendor and currency users as in table 1. Critical stages, cast and conditions for each process, vendor and user, were identified as detailed by Thompson and Chainey (2011). Contextualisation codes such as ‘Deference to community’ were also created. Context codes were in part derived from the existing literature, for example, the importance of claims to ‘insider’ roles and knowledge (Holt and Lee 2020). This was done in order to place the CSA in a material context. Matrix coding was then conducted cross tabulating the contextualizing codes with the CSA codes. These codes fed into the crime script coding, for example, technical features were coded and then distributed according to their function in the precondition/actualisation parts of the script. That exposed the technical, stealth, performative and organisational features at different stages of the CS execution. Cases were created for each contributor to the forum and the attribute function was used to record their role/stance. Text was coded to every contributor. Possible roles were: vendor, valid buyer, sock puppet. The forum has 72 cases of which x were xx. Vignettes were created for each participant, providing a sketch of their participation, for example, whether they changed position or left over time. Open data principles have been applied. The dataset is available and archived by the University of Edinburgh.
Findings
Meta criminal context: Benjamin (gender unknown) is a re-seller for the supplier Willy.Clock who had developed a public profile at the time and was known to the other members of the forum, and who was supported by another distributor, Mr. Mouse (Krebs 2014). Willy.clock is a Uganda based counterfeiter, Ryan Andrew Gustafson who was arrested in 2014 and who pled guilty in 2018 to charges of counterfeiting.
There is a network of sites validating each other so participants do not take anything on trust: Another onion site hosted support for note users and was used to validate the identities of distributors as a basic authenticity check. There was a well known distribution logic at work: The NCA states that criminal networks operate by breaking bulk production into smaller units that can be distributed and used by lower level criminals, so this appears to be a case of that being done. Benjamin introduces themselves in what becomes a long thread where buyers return to critique their product and debate how it should be used. Benjamin responds by defending the product, saying that buyers are using it improperly, and eventually agreeing that the counterfeit notes are not what they were.
Define the process in stages: The process is one of a spiral where the notes are tested in real world use and refined. The scrip derived from Benjamin and friends is therefore part of a meta-crime script involving the testing and innovation of the production process. Benjamin’s second stage role meant they could palm off some of the responsibility for poor quality product onto the supplier. The discussion was characterised by in depth explorations of the technical features of the notes, their consistency and reliability. Some participants appeared to be much closer to Benjamin and interacted with them outside the forum via a messaging service. Contributors ranged from these close accomplices to more casual users of the notes who were much less committed to the crime script.
The group context: To an extent the group as a whole worked on developing their crime script through comparing different experiences with using the notes, their opinions on their technical qualities, and advice about how to successfully use them without being detected. In this way what mattered to them became apparent. The technical qualities of the notes were a means to an end: their ability to use them successfully and then use the knowledge gained to buy more. Successful repeat use was
The interactional context: the forum allows for critique and requires a level of commitment from Benjamin. Benjamin introduces themselves as a known quantity, with feedback from another cryptomarket, the Black Market. They set out the security features of the product they are selling. It is claimed to be single ply, a security strip on the $100 dollar note, the ability to pass the pen test, a watermark, accurate colour using offset lithography, colour shifting ink, microprinting, a believable physical texture and resilience when dunked in water. The product seems to be high quality. Benjamin immediately adds a caveat. The bills do not contain magnetic ink, ferrofluid added to the bill to give it a distinct magnetic signature. That allows machines to distinguish between denominations and to reject fakes. Benjamin begins with a clear statement: any problems in passing the currency off as real are due to the failure of the buyer to adhere to an effective protocol.
Narrative breakdown: the thread begins positively. It all began so well – the golden period: sales and feedback are good. Benjamin begins with $100 notes and teases customers with the prospect of $50s and $20s. Early on after the thread begins they claim to have sold 300 $100 notes, for a face value of $30,000. Amounts purchased ranged up to 100 notes, $10,000 face value. They charge 50% of the face value of the notes though bulk buyers can obtain a larger discount. Buyers express excitement and anticipation for Benjamin receiving new stocks to pass onto them. The first bat h is well received. The second batch Benjamin sends out much less so. The quality of the notes deteriorates and users become disgruntled. A back and forth happens with one critic called out as a shill, and gradually disgruntlement builds as other users who had previously praised the notes now begin to question them. At this point the forum starts to divide. Users who have success with the notes allege that it is buyer failure to use them properly that is responsible for any problems.
If anybody finds their notes so atrocious, dunk them in water and wash all of the pen treatment off. It won’t pass the pen test, but it will sure as hell feel like real money … Alternatively, read through the forums and pay attention to what others to do give them their own touch. I’m not into replying to this negative BS, but I’ll manage to give you these few pointers.” Benjamin
One instance of a general phenomenon: As with other illicit and legal markets, there is a tendency towards bulking up sales following initial success. Benjamin decides to set a five note minimum order. Some buyers respond that this freezes them out. Note quality starts to decline:
“Lastly, and this is what is everyones biggest complain/concern so far, is the feel. Unless the clerk is wearing gloves I don’t know how they wouldn’t notice most of the bills waxy feel in comparison to the real notes. So that would be a dead give away to people who handle money regularly.”
Narrative turn with some colour: There then begins a conflictual phase in which Benjamin alternatively defends themselves and disappears for a time, stating they are working on fixing the problems with the notes that buyers have started to identify. Some participants sought to defend the operation from criticism. In one section, the discussion focused on security researcher Krebs (link) was sent counterfeit notes which he described as not being of very good quality. Several participants explained this away as a fakeout by Willy.Clock, the producer:
I think it was an inside operation by WC and Mouse if I had to guess, and ya thousands and thousands of retailers use Krebs and even catch up with him on Twitter, and everything seen on Krebs gets instantly passed down to loads of other websites and news sites too, if you google Mr Mouse counterfeits he’s all over the place thanks to Krebs.
The aim, they allege, was for the producer to spread misinformation to retailers about what they should look for in counterfeit notes.Complaints pile up on the forum. Orders do not arrive on time, quality suffers and communication with Benjamin becomes patchy. Benjamin stalls for time, promising refunds if the deliveries do not appear, which annoys customers whose money Benjamin has. Benjamin blames the market’s administrative system for problems and asks buyers to contact them directly and pay in bitcoin, triggering another round of criticism as this process gives the buyers no guarantees. The tone of the forum changes. Previous supportive members write long, highly critical posts. Benjamin struggles with justifying the perceived declining quality of the notes and promising improvements. They claim that the loss of quality is a matter of perception, that initial enthusiasm for the notes inflated expectations, and admits to some lower quality notes being shipped due to the influx of new orders limiting their quality control processes. Benjamin is suspended for a time by his supplier for failing to communicate well with their clients, and for not properly prepping the notes before sale, as the supplier begins to worry about the blowback from negative experiences with the notes Benjamin sells.
Benjamin complains about his relationship with the forum and sometimes the supplier, Willy.Clock. There is some suspicion that starting with good stock is a strategy to then switch buyers to less convincing notes. Some buyers acknowledge that they are on the lowest point on the food chain, and are unlikely to be offered supernotes which sell for much more and go to better invested users. Buyers argue with Benjamin and each other about the work they needed to do to the notes to make them look and feel more plausible.
I also went and just tried to play around with a note myself and I sprayed it with acrylic matte spray after putting it in water and drying it off and pressed it in the pages of a book and put a table leg on that. Now it’s fantastic! If the paper is good the rest of the note is great!!
Narrative closure: Benjamin in response goes on sabbatical in order to address the problems with the notes that buyers have identified, returning with what are claimed as notes that pass the pen test and feel close to the real thing. Enthusiasm resumes as these notes are distributed. As this wave of enthusiasm builds, the supplier is arrested, bringing the thread to an end.
Now about the context, the forum is a social space: Benjamin enjoys support from thread participants who advise on fine tuning note design and use. Benjamin had a number of buyers who were very positive about the product. As problems emerged they were accused of being sock puppet accounts. These acolytes proposed that if people were finding problems getting the notes accepted they were doing it wrong. They were following the wrong strategy, or were inherently suspicious individuals who invited greater scrutiny. Benjamin endorses these readings. Although one can never be sure, it did appear that these were genuine accounts who had made purchases through the system. Tell us why we now need to know about crime scripts: The business logic required a supporting chorus of satisfied buyers who could validate the quality of the notes and how they were used, in the form of a shared crime script.
Using the crime script
Start with a basic taxonomy: Participants had various roles: structuring, supporting, guiding, questioning, and various degrees of investment in Benjamin’s success. Some were highly critical of the entire process and said that passing of fake currency was only good for people who could not make it as drug dealers. Others saw their role as validating the genuineness of Benjamin’s efforts. One user, thisoldman, became critical in guiding buyers through the crime script, and users reported success with guidance from them. Thisoldman offered a guide for purchase to passing notes which could be bought through the site. They passed out tips on how to improve the passability of the notes by altering their appearance and feel.
The two separate scripts for Benjamin and their customers are set out side by side in Table 1. There was more information on the customers’ script as they participated much more in the discussion which involved troubleshooting their use of the notes. I have included both as they both centre around the forum in different ways. The forum was crucial to both scripts in different ways.
Table 1 Crime Script
Benjamin
Buyer
Entry
Set up cryptomarket account
Target scoping
Precondition
Bulk order from supplier
Reputation
Receive currency
Choose high traffic setting
Work notes
Selection
Market/sales/advertise
Select/stealth person/car
Select young cashier/busy time
Instrumental initiation
Receive orders from buyers
Pricing and divide up note ‘packs’
Identify high value/good return good
Instrumental actualisation
Process orders, select consumer/delivery
Buy goods/swap out cash
Continuation
After sales support/manage reputation/expectations on forum
Recycle bad product into good notes
Post condition
Close the feedback loop with supplier
Transfer legit cash
Exit/reset
Cash out/repost
Return to thread/leave
Showing there is more than a technical function/aptitude needed: From the point of view of Benjamin, creating a plausible cryptomarket identity was the first technical step. Then they needed to satisfy two reputational requirements. They needed to be in good standing with their supplier in order to secure a large enough order of notes to make redistribution profitable, and to appear both plausible and reliable to the users of the crytpomarket. Buyers were taking a risk buying the notes as they had little recourse if they turned out to be unusable. Throughout the process Benjamin had to calibrate their expectations of what they have, do the technical work of processing and sending orders, review users experience in the forum, send feedback to the supplier and cash out. Engagement with the forum was needed to manage the customer base and keep them involved:
My supplier has just informed me that a rather LARGE shipment is in DHL processing now, and should be coming out of customs shortly. Keep your fingers crossed people!”,,
A notable aspect of this was Benjamin’s willingness to expose their own process. A key instrumental precondition was prepping and batching notes for distribution and Benjamin wrote often about the process of preparing the notes, showing how the process might go wrong and acknowledging the uncertanties:
It means that MrMouse and I among other retailers are having to treat notes ourselves with makeshift methods from the boss, and we aren’t artists like Willy, so we struggle. We don’t have access to the chemicals that Willy does on his end for proper treatment. We get the job done (as in your notes will definitely pass the pen test), but recouping the pure authentic feel has been a challenge.
Closing the feedback loop with the supplier was necessary to continue the script. Benjamin had to give feedback to Willy.Clock and inform the forum of how the notes were changing in response.
Benjamin and some key contributors maintained a modus operandi document, effectively their own literal crime script, to guide users through the process. The document involved ensuring users did not try too high and invite suspicion, for example, by buying a one dollar item with a one hundred dollar note.
Showing how the findings are structured: The relationship between Benjamin and their buyers was one where Benjamin acted as an avatar for the notes. From the point of view of the user the central elements of the process were identifying a point to swap out fake notes for real ones, turn the counterfeit into goods that can be used or returned for cash or otherwise realise real money from the fake notes. That could involve working with an insider at a bank or a retail outlet where there would be considerable cash flow. Most contributors however used them at retail level by selecting a plausible target and time of day to buy small value items with a large note. Users selected targets according to their judgment on whether the note would be accepted. Some split targets by denomination, using $20s and $50s in busy outlets, or buying more $100s when they were confident the note quality and the target merited it. In their discussion the buyers mentioned how they slipped the counterfeits into the supply chain. Their varied tactics were aimed at laundering bad notes into good. Buying a small value item with $50 or $100 notes and obtaining change would do that. However there was a risk that cashiers would be more likely to scrutinise or refuse large value notes for small value items. Another route to actualisation was buying easily cashable tokens such as money cards.
A labour structure was in evidence in some cases. Most buyers used the notes as individuals. One buyer claimed to be running a larger operation with a team who would spend the notes. There was a sense that these were not major players and would be buying small amounts to use in ways that would not attract attention.
They discussed various failures and how to exit the scene after notes were rejected. None reported the police being called in response to an attempt to use fake notes.
Give a feel for the process: A skill promoted was the ability to work the notes into a consistent product, using the inevitably variable supply provided by Benjamin to produce something consistently workable:
My only issue now is that this batch was different then the last one, not because of quality but because Ink clearly did something wrong to the paper, personally I shut the fuck up and just fixed it myself by putting them in water like I said before, but some people just think they should get supernotes in the mail and not have to touch anything because they are really petty customers, so in your best interest Ink we think you should fix
Linking both ends together: Material skills were in evidence. Working the notes showed how the physical qualities of the notes were seen as features that had to be enacted in practice, through a combination of the ability of the buyer to work the notes into plausible currency, select the right target and approach in the right way. The combination of technique and technology came together to enact the counterfeit currency as a technology applied to a specific situation. In that sense the currency is only enacted in place.
Discussion
Remind the reader of the context: Distribution of counterfeit currency in this way is an example of a hybrid crime combining online distribution of the product and offline implementation of the crime, actually using the notes in a fraudulent way. The script required understanding the meta-criminal context in which Benjamin and the users operated. Benjamin was a secondary vendor for a primary note producer. Therefore they had to manage both their supply and manage expectations within the darknet community about the effectiveness of the notes. Benjamin’s second stage role meant they could palm off some of the responsibility for poor quality product onto the supplier but still needed to maintain a reasonably high hit rate among their customers. It was vital in order to keep selling the notes that users reported success with them. This is not an unusual element of digital crime. Some organisations have guides and helplines for both associates and victims in order to ensure the script goes smoothly, allowing for negation between victim and offender (Hernandez-Castro, Cartwright, and Stepanova 2017). A further analysis is invited which treats the counterfeit notes as part of a criminal assemblage. In this perspective the discourse around it, the production and distribution system, is part of a set of practices that produce the product as a workable entity.
Fit it into the literature: Though cryptomarkets focus on drug distribution some attempt to branch out into sales of weapons, counterfeit cigarettes and other goods such as counterfeit currency. This example shows that the system can be adapted so that the cryptomarket takes over the last mile of counterfeit distribution, and also the problems adapting the cryptomarket verification and quality control systems to a very different product. The community had great difficulty verifying the quality of the notes and had a single point of failure in the person of Benjamin, making it much less resilient than the section of the cryptomarket dealing in illicit drugs.
Size the issue: Overall the counterfeit trade in the cryptomarkets is fragile compared to the drug trade, as many participants recognised in their discussions. Another reason for the lack of resilience was the limited profit to be gained. Notes sell for 50% of face value. Therefore most profit is made in the production/distribution phases. When users take into account risk and the expense of crime commission the likely profit is much less than the theoretical profit of using counterfeit notes. Profits are further reduced if the user needs to employ others and share profits as part of their business model.
Talking about limits shows how the findings can be adapted in other contexts: The context limits some inferences that can be drawn. Participants do not disclose their country of operation. The darknet can be accessed from many countries, though it is difficult to access it from China. Data show most darknet use takes place in European, North America and Australia and the language/tone of the participants indicate they are based in the USA. References to the Federal Reserve and the fact they are using dollars in retail transactions indicates they are American. What is missing? There are a number of dark players in the cryptomarkets. The administrators and moderators govern who gets to create an account. They can ban accounts though a persistent hostile user can easily recreate another. Benjamin’s crime script is oriented towards his or her actions in the forum and there is a missing part to it, their relationship with their supplier.
What’s new/different? The cryptomarket provides a space for discussion and a hub for distribution. The counterfeit vendors/users employ an adaptable crime script. There is more variation in the buyers’ script. Benjamin’s script is constrained by the quality of the product available and the willingness of the buyers to pay for and use it. To an extent the group as a whole worked on developing their crime script through comparing different experiences with using the notes, their opinions on their technical qualities, and advice about how to successfully use them without being detected. In this way what mattered to them became apparent. The technical qualities of the notes were a means to an end: their ability to use them successfully and then use the knowledge gained to buy more. Successful repeat use was vital in order to make any kind of return, which was why consistent supply was so important to them. New context: insertion of market forum into crime script development and adaption. Discussion forums are critical in criminal evolution and innovation and we can also include other media such as Telegram channels in this. Users hybridise different modes to produce a workable modus operandi.
Why technology matters in one sense: The forum has certain technological affordances that matter. It is an example of a self-generated hierarchy. Why technology matters in another sense, and why we need to modify what we understand by crimetech: the notes have to be worked in different stages to make them plausible to different audiences, from the buyer to the target. That goes from batching to distribution, prepared for use and then distributed. Both Benjamin and the buyers treated the notes they received. Crime is embodied as craft work, recognising the personal, emotional labour that has to be involved in crime commission.
Finesse existing theory: The organisational context and the character of the criminal relationship is quite limited as Bejnamin has no control over the buyers so this relationship is voluntary. In comparison money mules are sometimes coerced through threats or debt relationships [ref]. The character of the crime is one of mutual exchange. It can be understood in terms of an dapted rational choice theory, but with added recognition of positionality/identity as motivating factors, materiality. Both vendor and buyer morally orient themselves to each other and the crime itself. ‘Rational’ is often drawn narrowly in terms of interests and should include the person’s identification of their own moral positioning in relation to the criminal activity, their motivation.
What can I infer? Both Ink and the buyers engage in innovation and fine tuning of their crime scripts. For Ink, reputation management and playing the role of the vendor willing to learn and respond to their critics is a key part of maintaining their status. For the buyers, they discuss how to successfully make use of the currency, avoid incurring legal liability while adapting to potential surveillance conditions.
Conclusion
What are the consequences of this paper (and I’d better rethink the title now): I have argued that understanding the crime script in this context is something supported by the community as a social organization and also as a material structure enacted through craft practices. As a consequence, intervention might consider taking place at the level of craft labour. There is a great degree of tacit knowledge involved in criminal enterprises. Crime script analysis tends to focus on the technical steps which foregrounds a rational choice approach when it comes to attacking the incentive structure. This analysis shows how reputation and plausibility are crucial elements at different stages, and the labour needed to achieve them.
Acknowledgements
For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.
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Is crime in competition with being law abiding? For rational choice theorists the answer is mostly yes. The decision to commit crime is a calculated judgement based on self interest. There is nothing particularly special about criminals or crime. In contrast both deviance theory and bio-psychological criminology say there is something distinct about both. Bio-psychological theories examine criminal motive in terms of personal development traits: how do criminals depart from the normal. No need to explain the costs of compliance. Deviance or cultural criminology also says crime could be attractive in itself, as a separate state of transgression. Katz (1988) identified the thrill of deviance in immediate acquisitive crimes like shoplifting and Goldsmith and Wall (2022) highlight the life stage attractions of some types of cyber scalliness.
I am attracted to this approach but slightly wary of the background assumption that thrills are what characterises these types of crime. Apparently thrill seeking crimes might provide emotional satisfaction in other ways. Some apparently thrill seeking crimes require working at and cooperation. We can understand more about behaviour such as trolling through the attractions of cooperation to attack a target. This is all good but sets us up for a hypothesis. As crime is becoming more rationalised, are these seductions lost. If the controller of your shoplifting gang is expecting you to turn round £1000 of shoplifted goods a day, the motivation and experience is likely to be very different from thrill driven shoplifting.
Given how organised and systematised shoplifting is now we can hypothesise that the attraction of transgression is less significant as a motive. Shoplifting becomes more like the piece work that was the labour process in early modern factories, organised in labour gangs that were often also kinship groups. We also should change our understanding of what gangs are. These gangs are more mobile and adaptable, and less focused on territory, than the classic modern and post-industrial gang that characterised criminal life in Glasgow, Los Angeles and other places.
Goldsmith A and Wall DS (2022) The seductions of cybercrime: Adolescence and the thrills of digital transgression. European Journal of Criminology 19(1). SAGE Publications: 98–117. DOI: 10.1177/1477370819887305.
Katz J (1988) Seductions Of Crime: Moral And Sensual Attractions In Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books.
There is a spike in exports of household white goods and consumer electornics to former Soviet Central Asia and the neighbourhood. Why is that? The assumption is they are headed by hook and by crook to Russia. What for? It is claimed they are needed for the war. There is something in them Russia needs. Metal for MiGs? Batteries for the drones? Neither. Semiconductors are in desparate need as the war machine expends its guided missles and drones over Ukraine. Russia is importing washing machines, refrigerators and other items via places like Kazakhstan in order to get their mitts on the microchips. I was interested in this example of a rapidly emerging illicit trade.
It is a nice story about an everyday item suddenly becoming vital due to the bitter war. But as reporting by Tegler shows, not likely not to be true, or if true, not very significant. Drones, missiles and other items being expended in the war create a thirst for microchips. However the kind of chips you get in household items are not critical to these weapons, and though they are useful they are of a kind that is widely available. Higher imports might just be due to good old fashioned need, as domestic industry is throttled or forced to turn to war production. There is however a trade in far more useful microchips being washed through third countries. China is likely a big supplier.
What sanctions have done is highlighted how so many aspects of life in a modern economy rely on microchips. Want to shift to a non-Western payment system? You will need lots and lots of microhips. So household appliances are vital to the war because households rely on them, not because they are a form of secondary war production.
It is difficult to understand the appeal of Ardern, Sturgeon, Trump and Johnson without recognising that politics is about providing psychological goods: the warm bath of a seratonin hit, with the odd excitement of a dopamine rush to break it up now and then. Western politicians have given up on fixing our declining productivity or taming capitalism. They now hope to provide reassuring narratives and national psychodramas. The language displays that. Commentary over Nicola Sturgeon’s rule mentioned how reassuring her presence was during COVID, and how pleasant her social democratic narrative was, while not pointing to any actual real world impact her policies had. Criticism of Trump during the same period tended to focus on his unwillingness to be reassuring in those terms. He is more on the dopamine based continuum I feel. It is not that Sturgeon had no policies, just that they exist purely as props in the psychological narrative being offered. Something she was very accomplished at. Opposition parties’ attempts to point to this or that inadequacy in policy delivery missed the point.
Security experts cal this ‘security theatre’, measures which have a relatively low immediate cost and which induce the sense of safety in the target without any measurable effect on actual safety. For example, the US TSA introduced strict checks on air passengers following the attacks on 11th September 2001. These measures had high externalities, and so put off passengers from travelling by air they had a measurable effect on road traffic accidents. The characteristic of security theatre measures is that their proponents refuse to factor in externalities and opportunity costs. They sometimes directly increase insecurity as to avoid too many false positives their operators hack them.
Security theatre is not a bad aim in itself. Sometimes trust has to be demonstrated and it might be as important to show people they are safer as much as making them actually safer. Politically it may be necessary to reassure high value clients so they have a sense that ‘something is being done’. Interface design embeds that. People take friendlier safety theatrics over alienating security reality any day. There are also significant problems stemming from people’s misperception of risk or safety. Fear of crime can be debilitating, isolating and wearing. A little risk is a good thing, for an individual and society.
Security in life and in politics creates a safety bubble (the serotonin bit) but also needs a hard, thrilling edge to show how miserable and dangerous life is outside (the dopamine bit). Also known as ‘England’, for viewers in Scotland. So what? One of the reasons we have such a strong focus on narrative in politics is that there are social facts which are unavoidable but nobody has the will or desire to do anything about. Number one is that inequality tends to increase, absent war or revolution. Narrative is a cheap-ish way of softening the edges and a good way of convincing the middle class that the state spending they benefit from is good in principle as well as happily coincident with their interests. On a micro-level, social media is designed around dopamine, providing the happy little hits that drive interaction and turning us all into a ore to be deep mined.
What to do? Realty always comes a-knockin’ of course, but it takes its time. The main problem is that by design our political system gives politicians very little to actually do. Decisions are farmed out to abstract entities or contracted companies and arms length agencies. There is no real fix for that. Maybe we could make all children raised by wolves, as most Boomers claim to have been.
