FINANCIAL INVESTIGATION OF SEXTORTION THROUGH THE LENS OF PAYMENT INFRASTRUCTURE AND MONEY MULE DETECTION

Abstract

The rapid growth of financially motivated cybercrime recorded at the global level necessitates the development of specialized methodological tools for its detection and investigation within the financial monitoring system. The purpose of the article is to examine the payment infrastructure of financially motivated sexual extortion and to develop methodological foundations for its identification within the financial monitoring system. The study is based on a comparative analysis of official statistics from law enforcement agencies and international organizations across multiple jurisdictions, employing methods of typological analysis of financial crimes, transactional profiling, and forensic reconstruction of fund movement chains. It is established that financially motivated sexual extortion is characterized by a stable transactional typology: serial small-value transfers, atypical temporal activity, discrepancy between payment references and context, and indicators of transit account usage with subsequent value extraction through convertible virtual assets and cross-border channels. The study systematizes five primary payment channels of the scheme with corresponding risk indicators. A mechanism for detecting "mirror transactional anomalies" is substantiated, enabling the correlation of fiat and cryptocurrency flows without obtaining KYC data at the initial investigative stage. A three-stage forensic algorithm for financial investigation is developed, encompassing primary express detection, retrospective transactional analysis, and procedural digital evidence preservation. The necessity of modifying standard risk indicators for destabilized payment environments is substantiated, where classical behavioral and geographic compliance filters demonstrate a critical level of false positives. Effective counteraction to financially motivated sexual extortion requires a transition from reactive responses to a systemic financial investigation methodology grounded in risk-based analysis of transactional anomalies across a composite set of parameters. The proposed toolkit ensures the procedural linking of local intermediaries to transnational scheme organizers even when the ultimate value extraction point lies beyond the reach of national investigation.