Big Data Shines a Light on Bad Actors, But Shadows Remain

This week's publication of the Pandora Papers–which the International Consortium of International Journalists based on a trove of private data leaked from offshore tax havens–showcased the alarming extent of fraud and corruption in the world. While big data tech like graph analytics and machine learning can help to a shine light on bad actors, we'll always be playing catch up, fraud hunters tell Datanami. The sheer numbers behind the Pandora Papers, which the ICIJ published on October 3, 2021, are staggering. The ICIJ was provided with 11.9 million documents, including text files, PDFs, images, emails, and spreadsheets, from 14 offshore tax havens, totaling 2.9 TB of data. The documents contained information about 27,000 shell companies created to protect the assets of 29,000 beneficial owners, including 130 billionaires and 330 politicians from 90 countries.