Digital evidence is estimated to be a factor in about 90% of criminal cases, and mobile phones are the most seized devices. The popularity of smartphones has also increased the ease of sharing high-quality multimedia via social media and native texting. In CSEA criminal cases, images and videos can serve as important forms of digital evidence – whether it is a “sext” sent from the offender to the victim, or child sex abuse material created by the offender. Although the offenders conceal their faces, other biometric features are present, including the dorsal side of the hand, and research has shown that knuckles and fingernail beds are valid forms of unique biometrics for identification. This presentation will discuss the research and development of the Suspect Hand Biometrics Tool – a digital forensics tool that automatically processes images and videos to extract knuckle and fingernail bed biometrics. We will provide use cases demonstrating the Suspect Hand Biometrics Tool, which will be free of charge for law enforcement. In addition, cases will be presented that outline the process for conducting and presenting forensic hand comparisons in court as evidence. Finally, we will include recommendations on collecting comparison and exemplar imagery for law enforcement investigations that require forensic hand comparisons.

Warning messages as a situational crime prevention strategy for child sexual abuse material online have been called for over a decade. A growing number of deployments have occurred, and the evidence base is growing. This presentation will provide an overview of the empirical evidence to date, including multiple studies undertaken by the University of Tasmania, which include three experiments undertaken targeting adults in Australia, the United Kingdom, and globally, and finally a study involving 16-18 year old Australian adolescents. The presentation will also discuss a new initiative to work with industry partners to deploy messages at scale: the CSAM Deterrence Centre (led by Jesuit Social Services who operate StopItNow! Australia). Online deterrence campaigns and messaging are vital to creating an Internet that is hostile to CSAM, persuading prospective offenders from attempting to access the content as early as possible within an offending trajectory, and lowering the overall market for CSAM online. The presentation will also touch on several other research projects currently underway to disrupt CSAM offending online.

For individuals experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) who feel discomfort in their relationships but have not yet named it as abuse, anonymous online forums can be a vital source of validation and support. Analyzing these self-reports provides insights into the early awareness stage of IPV that legal and social institutions do not track. While large language models (LLMs) lend well to the long-form nature of these forums, their reliability in identifying IPV indicators has yet to be determined. To establish ground truth data for benchmarking, we recruited two (2) subject matter experts working in domestic violence social services to independently annotate 225 posts seeking relationship advice from the Reddit subforum ("subreddit") "r/relationship_advice". Of these, both experts concurred that 173 posts were mainly about a romantic relationship. Indicators of IPV and intent to exert power and control on the victim are highly correlated for each expert (Kendall's tau=0.88, 0.92). However, there is substantial disagreement and only moderate correlation between experts on whether IPV is indicated (Cohen's kappa=0.42, tau=0.54) and whether there is intent to exert power and control (kappa=0.45, tau=0.59). Experts generally agreed on the absence of behaviors tied to physical, sexual, and financial abuse but not on their presence (92%, 94%, and 97% agreement, kappa=0.68, 0.68, 0.43, respectively). Larger disagreement was observed for behaviors associated with emotional or psychological abuse (76% agreement, kappa=0.52). Our results demonstrate that obtaining ground truth for benchmarking LLMs in detecting IPV and associated behavior is more challenging than expected.

Specialised police units across the world receive hundreds of thousands of reports of child sexual exploitation (CSE) or abuse (CSA), and the resulting investigations lead to the seizure of millions of files found on digital devices. Various reporting agencies, government, and non-government organisations collect, triage, analyse, as well as store these vast volumes of data. There are prominent databases accessible to many, but not all law enforcement, and the lack of a centralised source of truth leaves the intelligence scattered. Despite quasi-structured workflows for sharing information on identified victims, or offenders, categorisation, or annotation for previously seen materials; there are significant gaps.

These intelligence sharing gaps can be compartmentalised into three areas: technical, procedural, and cultural. Warren will tell the story about how his project will use operational police data from CSE/CSA cases to examine novel approaches for deconstructing the existing constraints and how an intelligence-led policing model will draw these artefacts together to overcome the constraints in a meaningful way.

The darknet and its associated cybercrime ecosystem have become central facilitators of ransomware, transforming it from isolated malware incidents into a structured, transnational threat industry. This talk examines ransomware through the framework of darknet infrastructure, including ransomware-as-a-service platforms, initial access brokers, cryptocurrency laundering mechanisms, and leak sites, all of which collectively enable attacker operations and expand their reach. A key component of the discussion involves profiling ransomware threat actors by analyzing their motivations, techniques, and socio-psychological drivers within diverse financial, political, and ideological contexts. Furthermore, the talk will address the significant challenges encountered by law enforcement agencies.

Sentencing in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) cases requires courts to assess harm, culpability, and risk in contexts where direct evidence is often limited or unavailable. Victims are frequently unidentified, and digital material is mediated through classification systems, summaries, and varying forms of presentation. This presentation reports the findings of a scoping review examining how harm, culpability and risk are constructed in court, and how courtroom interactions may influence judicial decision-making. The review maps doctrinal, empirical, and theoretical literature addressing CSAM offending behaviours and criminal justice responses, particularly in the sentencing of adult offenders. Reflexive thematic analysis is used to identify patterns in how harm, culpability and risk are conceptualised and constructed. The findings highlight the role of extra-legal factors, including judicial emotion, advocacy framing, and the form of evidence presentation, which may operate as proxies where direct information about legally relevant factors is limited or unavailable. The review demonstrates that sentencing in CSAM cases is shaped not only by legal factors, but also by human factors such as perception, interpretation, and emotional response. These findings extend understanding of how extra-legal factors influence cybercrime sentencing outcomes and provide a foundation for subsequent ethnographic research examining sentencing practices in court.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates the illegal wildlife trade at US$7-23 billion annually, ranking amongst the largest transnational criminal markets. Research into other types of illicit markets (e.g., drugs) shows trust is important in facilitating sales, particularly when operating online and across borders. Building on this literature, our study focuses on trust in relation to product descriptors and extends this line of inquiry to the online illicit and/or unregulated wildlife trade. We examine how online seller trustworthiness interacts with product-level factors to shape sales outcomes, focusing on exotic pet bird sales in Australia using six-months of advertisements scraped from a leading e-commerce classifieds platform. We use generalized linear modelling to assess whether observable indicators of seller trustworthiness (i.e., cooperative and responsive profile attributes) and product-level factors (i.e., bird characteristics and price) influence advertisement popularity and speed of sale. Results demonstrate that seller profile-attributes significantly accelerated online transactions, while product-level factors were not significant predictors of market duration. Findings highlight perceived trustworthiness as a critical human factor in shaping decision-making in the illicit and/or unregulated online wildlife trade, however future research should examine more direct illicit contexts (e.g., declared pests or protected species) provided data is available.