DETECTING PONZI AND PYRAMID BUSINESS SCHEMES IN CHOREOGRAPHED WEB SERVICES

Businesses are increasingly using web service choreographies to implement dynamic service invocations and content specific operations. These web service choreographies can be misused at multiple levels - by exploiting their technical capabilities and using them to design complex illegal business schemes such as Ponzi, pyramid and money laundering schemes. One of the main problems with the illegal schemes is that they are similar to legal multistage business schemes; their illegality is apparent only to a macroscopic observer. This paper describes some of these schemes and demonstrates how to obtain evidence pertaining to the schemes using cryptographically-secure local message repositories. The evidence gathered is of considerable value to financial fraud investigators, business arbiters, potential investors and judicial actors.