Governing Illicit Online Markets through Communication and Trust

This project investigates the role of communication among market users is for building market trust in illicit and online markets. Because the illicit and online nature of such markets necessitates adopting specific trust mechanisms to create a functioning market. Trust-creating monitoring mechanisms are usually established through communication across various actors inthe market – admins, buyers and sellers. This project provides not only a theoretical framework for the adopted monitoring mechanisms to inhibit trust but also provides an exploratory analysis of online stolen credit card markets using social network analysis methods. This research is funded by the NSF Securing Cyber Space Project.