TY - CHAP A1 - Büsgen, André A1 - Klöser, Lars A1 - Kohl, Philipp A1 - Schmidts, Oliver A1 - Kraft, Bodo A1 - Zündorf, Albert ED - Cuzzocrea, Alfredo ED - Gusikhin, Oleg ED - Hammoudi, Slimane ED - Quix, Christoph T1 - From cracked accounts to fake IDs: user profiling on German telegram black market channels T2 - Data Management Technologies and Applications N2 - Messenger apps like WhatsApp and Telegram are frequently used for everyday communication, but they can also be utilized as a platform for illegal activity. Telegram allows public groups with up to 200.000 participants. Criminals use these public groups for trading illegal commodities and services, which becomes a concern for law enforcement agencies, who manually monitor suspicious activity in these chat rooms. This research demonstrates how natural language processing (NLP) can assist in analyzing these chat rooms, providing an explorative overview of the domain and facilitating purposeful analyses of user behavior. We provide a publicly available corpus of annotated text messages with entities and relations from four self-proclaimed black market chat rooms. Our pipeline approach aggregates the extracted product attributes from user messages to profiles and uses these with their sold products as features for clustering. The extracted structured information is the foundation for further data exploration, such as identifying the top vendors or fine-granular price analyses. Our evaluation shows that pretrained word vectors perform better for unsupervised clustering than state-of-the-art transformer models, while the latter is still superior for sequence labeling. KW - Clustering KW - Natural language processing KW - Information extraction KW - Profile extraction KW - Text mining Y1 - 2023 SN - 978-3-031-37889-8 (Print) SN - 978-3-031-37890-4 (Online) U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37890-4_9 N1 - 10th International Conference, DATA 2021, Virtual Event, July 6–8, 2021, and 11th International Conference, DATA 2022, Lisbon, Portugal, July 11-13, 2022 SP - 176 EP - 202 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Büsgen, André A1 - Klöser, Lars A1 - Kohl, Philipp A1 - Schmidts, Oliver A1 - Kraft, Bodo A1 - Zündorf, Albert T1 - Exploratory analysis of chat-based black market profiles with natural language processing T2 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications N2 - Messenger apps like WhatsApp or Telegram are an integral part of daily communication. Besides the various positive effects, those services extend the operating range of criminals. Open trading groups with many thousand participants emerged on Telegram. Law enforcement agencies monitor suspicious users in such chat rooms. This research shows that text analysis, based on natural language processing, facilitates this through a meaningful domain overview and detailed investigations. We crawled a corpus from such self-proclaimed black markets and annotated five attribute types products, money, payment methods, user names, and locations. Based on each message a user sends, we extract and group these attributes to build profiles. Then, we build features to cluster the profiles. Pretrained word vectors yield better unsupervised clustering results than current state-of-the-art transformer models. The result is a semantically meaningful high-level overview of the user landscape of black market chatrooms. Additionally, the extracted structured information serves as a foundation for further data exploration, for example, the most active users or preferred payment methods. KW - Clustering KW - Natural Language Processing KW - Information Extraction KW - Profile Extraction KW - Text Mining Y1 - 2022 SN - 978-989-758-583-8 U6 - http://dx.doi.org/10.5220/0011271400003269 SN - 2184-285X SP - 83 EP - 94 ER -