The nexus between terrorism and product counterfeiting in the United States

Brandon A. Sullivan, Steven M. Chermak, Jeremy M. Wilson and Joshua D. Freilich

Global Crime, 2014, vol. 15, issue 3-4, 357-378

Abstract: Terrorists use a wide variety of methods to fund their operations, obtain profits and carry out ideologically driven goals. Terrorist organisations have increasingly been linked to product counterfeiting crimes, but evidence for this connection is mostly anecdotal and speculative, lacking systematic empirical evaluation. This study mines open-source data to capture known product counterfeiting schemes linked to known extremists in the United States since 1990. We utilise the Extremist Financial Crime Database (EFCDB) and the Michigan State University Center for Anti-Counterfeiting and Product Protection's (A-CAPP) Incident Database to provide an overview of both the schemes and the individual suspects involved in these crimes. We uncovered ten product counterfeiting schemes linked to terrorism, while the vast majority of suspects involved are non-extremist collaborators motivated by profit, not extremist ideology. These findings indicate the need for policies focusing on criminal networks broadly, expanding beyond restrictive efforts only targeting terrorists.

Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17440572.2014.919227 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:fglcxx:v:15:y:2014:i:3-4:p:357-378

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FGLC20

DOI: 10.1080/17440572.2014.919227

Access Statistics for this article

Global Crime is currently edited by Carlo Morselli

More articles in Global Crime from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().