Abstract
Money laundering facilitates serious crime, enables the expansion of criminal operations, and destabilises economies. Extant scholarship is largely concerned with anti-money laundering approaches, with far less attention being paid to the language and behaviours of the individuals who engage in money laundering. ‘Dark-web’ discussion fora are prime loci for illicit knowledge exchange and key enablers of money laundering, yet, are underexplored as sites for understanding the online activities and behaviours of users. This paper reports on a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of one such forum, guided by research questions around the key topics and common linguistic strategies by which knowledge is exchanged within a large community of individuals interested in money laundering, and the ways in which this community serves its members. The analysis identifies the forum as an extremely efficient and productive site for knowledge-exchange and thus ‘criminal upskilling’, which is attributed to three core characteristics: a strict adherence to community rules, a highly knowledgeable user base, and a culture of friendliness and reciprocity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 0329777 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| Early online date | 5 Aug 2025 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Aug 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © 2025 Emily Chiang. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Data Access Statement
Data cannot be shared publicly because it is sensitive and illicit in nature, and especially because of the possibility that it could be used to the advantage of people with criminal interests. This is in accordance with the Aston University Ethics Committee. Data will be made available from the Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD) at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics for researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data. Access can be requested at [email protected]Funding
This research was supported by a UKRI Innovate UK Smart Grant (Project No.: 1002803). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
UN SDGs
This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
-
SDG 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Keywords
- Humans
- Internet
- Knowledge
- Laundering
- Linguistics
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Linguistic mechanisms of knowledge-exchange in a dark-web money laundering forum'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Cite this
- APA
- Author
- BIBTEX
- Harvard
- Standard
- RIS
- Vancouver