CMATA: Cyber Trafficking Monitoring and Tracking Prototype

Abstract

With the evolution of the Internet, trafficking has broader and borderless operations targeting virtual spaces where individuals of different ages can be subjected to cyber trafficking. Despite the government's efforts to combat cyber trafficking, the growing number of cases is alarming. One apparent reason is that traffickers keep advancing their technical strategies, so it becomes more challenging for law enforcement to investigate complex and transnational organized crime. Thus, this paper presents the development of a cyber monitoring and trafficking web application integrated with a web scraper that identifies websites with a high probability of being used in cyber trafficking activities. The web scraper was written using Beautiful Soup. With the result of the sensitivity analysis conducted in the study, beautiful soup was determined to be the most suitable tool for developing web scraping algorithms based on performance, portability, and accuracy compared with the Scrapy and Selenium tools. Upon the initial testing of the developed prototyped in tracking and monitoring suspected cyber traffickers, it was able to scrape 45 potential trafficking websites. The initial testing result shows that this kind of application integrated with a scraper to identify cyber traffickers with a visualization dashboard can help law enforcement officers identify, track, and monitor online traffickers easily and quickly.