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Melvin R. J. Soudijn

Melvin R. J. Soudijn
Landelijke Eenheid · Analyse & Onderzoek

Ph.D.

About

73
Publications
81,770
Reads
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813
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 2007 - present
Dutch National Police
Position
  • Senior Researcher
Education
September 1991 - August 1998
Leiden University
Field of study
  • Sinology

Publications

Publications (73)
Article
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The confiscation of the server of an encrypted telephone provider resulted in the retrieval of millions of text messages about covert activities that were overtly discussed between criminals. It provided a unique window into serious organised crime and the people involved. In this article, a social network analysis was carried out on accounts who c...
Article
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Reporting entities have been made jointly responsible for protecting the financial system against money laundering. However, because of privacy rules, law enforcement is not allowed to share details about underlying criminal evidence with private parties. Gatekeepers thus do not have background information on predicate offenses or other criminal ac...
Chapter
In recent years, the Netherlands police seized various financial records during criminal investigations into three outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCGs). An analysis of these records shows a relatively simple revenue model: the rank-and-file members serve as a cash cow, paying membership dues, fines, and other associated expenses. The largest source of i...
Article
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Yarin Eski and Anna Sergi recently published an article in Trends in Organized Crime called 'Ethnic profiling of organised crime? A tendency of mafia-cation in the Netherlands' Eski and Sergi (Trends Organ Crime, 1?20 2023). In their theoretical contribution, the authors claim that the policing of organised crime in the Neth-erlands amounts to ethn...
Chapter
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The effectiveness of the reporting system is a topic of hot debate. It’s unclear how many criminal investigations SARs generate. Some researchers also worry that reporting entities are unnecessarily burdened. Reporting entities themselves sometimes also wonder what it is all for. They complain that follow-up feedback is often lacking. Meanwhile the...
Article
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This article, based on a literature review, looks at the ways in which AI can be used for criminal activities. The literature can be divided in three categories: (1) crimes with AI, (2) crimes on AI, and (3) crimes by AI. The first category consists of the use of AI to commit traditional forms of crime. A well-known form is deepfakes in which peopl...
Article
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In recent years, the rise of big data has revolutionized many domains, including policing. Research is lacking, however, on the various ways in which the police use big data applications. This study provides new insights into the ways the Netherlands Police currently use big data and algorithmic applications. Based on a novel data source—job vacanc...
Preprint
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De vierde Europese anti-witwasrichtlijn verplicht elke EU-lidstaat een National Risk Assessment (NRA) Witwassen op te stellen. In de Nederlandse NRA worden 15 witwasvormen als risico voor het financieel stelsel bestempeld. In dit artikel wordt gekeken in hoeverre deze witwasvormen door de meldketen worden gesignaleerd wanneer het gaat om personen d...
Article
Hebben drugshandelaren ook verdachte transacties? In antwoord op deze vraag zijn 13.159 personen die door de politie verdacht werden van drugshandel gematcht met de Financial Intelligence Unit-Nederland. Het blijkt dat 21,9% van deze verdachten geregistreerd staan met één of meerdere transactiemeldingen. Daarbij is sprake van Thomas Piketty-achtige...
Article
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In order to launder large amounts of money, (drug) criminals can seek help from financial facilitators. According to the FATF, these facilitators are operating increasingly business-like and even participate in professional money laundering networks. This study examines the extent to which financial facilitators in the Netherlands exhibit business-...
Article
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As existing literature on intergenerational continuity of criminal behavior is mainly based on data on ‘general’ offenders and their children, the current study aims to improve our knowledge by looking at intergenerational continuity of crime among a national sample of children of organized crime offenders. Judicial data on all (N= 478) offenders c...
Chapter
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To assess the extent to which life jihadist travellers from the Netherlands were involved in organized crime, we use police data to analyse their criminal histories, financial records and social networks. Results indicate travellers are significantly overrepresented in crime in terms of the amount of criminal antecedents they have. However, anteced...
Article
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In de afgelopen jaren hebben big data een revolutie teweeggebracht in veel domeinen, waaronder het politiewerk. Er is echter onvoldoende inzicht in de verschillende toepassingen die door de politie worden gebruikt en wat de mogelijke voordelen van big data-analyse zijn voor de politie. Literatuur over big data en politiewerk richt zich voornamelijk...
Article
Full-text available
In de afgelopen jaren hebben big data een revolutie teweeggebracht in veel domeinen, waaronder het politiewerk. Er is echter onvoldoende inzicht in de verschillende toepassingen die door de politie worden gebruikt en wat de mogelijke voordelen van big data-analyse zijn voor de politie. Literatuur over big data en politiewerk richt zich voornamelijk...
Article
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De afgelopen jaren zijn enkele servers van aanbieders van cryptocommunicatie in beslag genomen. Op dergelijke servers staan miljoenen berichten opgeslagen waarin criminele gebruikers openlijk over hun verborgen activiteiten communiceren. Daarmee geven deze berichten een unieke inkijk in het criminele milieu. Dit artikel richt zich op de Nederlandst...
Article
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De Financial Action Task Force (FATF) stelt dat witwassers groepsgewijs kunnen opereren in professionele witwasnetwerken. Professioneel verwijst daarbij naar het tegen vergoeding leveren van diensten op het gebied van witwassen, en netwerken naar het onderling uitbesteden of gebruik maken van de benodigde expertise. Of zulke witwasnetwerken ook in...
Article
We draw from aspects of Black's theory of conflict management to (1) provide a description of the types of disputes occurring at the highest levels of the drug trade and (2) examine whether conflicts that end in violence differed from those that found a peaceful resolution. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyse 33 incidents of smuggling tran...
Preprint
Full-text available
The use of big data and crime is predominantly discussed in relation to geographic analysis, predictive justice, or facial recognition, not in relation to the authorities’ approach to money laundering. Because big data in relation to money laundering is a fairly underreported phenomenon, we take the opportunity to engage in an in-depth discussion o...
Article
In our review article, we go into four conditions that influence the complexity of organized crime money laundering. First are diverse types of crime and forms in which proceeds are generated, including the type of payment, the visibility of crimes to victims or authorities, and the lapse before financial investigation occurs (if it does). Second,...
Article
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Decisive action against criminal outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCGs) ranks high on the criminal justice agenda. Nevertheless, in many Western European countries the number of OMCG chapters has increased rapidly. Official OMCG support clubs also have mushroomed. The present study extends prior research from the Netherlands and elsewhere by employing a g...
Article
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This article examines the financial life of 131 jihadi travellers (JTs), also known as foreign terrorist fighters, from the Netherlands. For the purpose of the underlying research, access was acquired to all their banking transactions in the year preceding their departure: over 60,000 transactions in total. Their income from work or employment, var...
Article
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Based on criminal career data of a sample of 601 police-identified outlaw motorcycle gang members and an age-matched comparison group of 300 non-gang affiliated motorcycle owners, the current analysis examines various dimensions of the criminal careers of outlaw bikers, including participation, onset, frequency, and crime mix. Results show that Dut...
Article
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This article is based on 4 Dutch Crime Pattern Analyses on money laundering reports. These reports are part of a four-yearly cycle that provides a periodic overview on organized crime in the Netherlands. The reports cover a time span of 12 years, starting from 2004 till 2016. During this time period, stricter anti-money laundering laws and more awa...
Book
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De huidige studie heeft tot doel het in kaart brengen van crimineel gedrag onder leden van OMG’s (outlaw motorcycle gang) en leden van OMG-supportclubs. Wereldwijd zijn OMG-leden betrokken bij gewelddadige en georganiseerde criminaliteit (Barker, 2015; Bain & Lauchs, 2017).Ook in Nederland hebben zich de afgelopen jaren verschillende incidenten voo...
Book
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Sinds 2004 wordt in opdracht van het College van procureurs-generaal elke vier jaar het Nationaal Dreigingsbeeld (NDB) opgeleverd. Het NDB is een toekomstgerichte analyse van de georganiseerde criminaliteit waarin dreigingen voor de Nederlandse samenleving worden aangegeven. Het opgeleverde inzicht dient ter ondersteuning van beleidsvorming op het...
Article
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In this paper we analyze how Dutch Public Prosecution’s press releases about money laundering and underground banking are received by producers and consumers of online news reports. First we take a closer look at how journalists (re)framed six official press releases in 75 news reports. It turns out that journalists do not regularly adopt the succe...
Chapter
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Inleiding Het rapport dat de Parlementaire enquêtecommissie opsporingsmethoden in 1996 opleverde, is een mijlpaal in de geschiedenis van onderzoek naar de Nederlandse georganiseerde misdaad (PEO, 1996). Het rapport gaat onder andere in op verschillende autochtone, allochtone en buitenlandse criminele groeperingen, hun activiteiten, de relatie met d...
Article
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Wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar de georganiseerde misdaad in Nederland maakt vaak gebruik van politiegegevens in de vorm van afgeronde opsporingsonderzoeken. Dit levert veel kennis op. Het is echter ook bekend dat opsporingsonderzoeken hun beperkingen kennen. In dit artikel wordt vanuit een street-level bureaucracy invalshoek een verklaring gezocht...
Chapter
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This chapter describes the emerging focus on situational prevention of organised crime, an area in which repression and a law enforcement approach has traditionally dominated. It elaborates on the theoretical background as well as important critical reflections. Situational crime prevention theory is applied to the case of synthetic drugs productio...
Article
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This research, based primarily on financial records of Colombian money smugglers found by Dutch police investigators, describes the costs and operations of a segment of the high-level drug trade not previously documented in the scholarly literature. Cocaine traffickers pay brokers to move their revenues from the Netherlands to Colombia. The transfe...
Article
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There are management and organizational problems common to both legal and illegal businesses, such as moving one party to act in the interest of another rather than his own. In principal-agency theory, the party that wants someone else to do a job on his behalf is called the “principal” and the other party is called the “agent”. Principal-agency th...
Article
Purpose In accordance with the literature on money laundering, policymakers and researchers often use a model which distinguishes three successive stages: placement, layering and integration. But how well does this model compare to actual investigations of money laundering in relation to large-scale drug trafficking? Design/methodology/approach Th...
Article
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In this article, which serves as an introduction, the authors take a closer look at theoretical definitions as well as empirical manifestations of money laundering. They discuss the judicial definition and the often used theoretical distinction between ‘three stages’ of money laundering. Furthermore, the authors provide the reader with a quick over...
Article
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Introduction to special issue on Crime Money, Money Laundering, and Asset Recovery
Article
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Hawaladars, like employees from regular financial institutions, can come into contact with criminal money. The important question is: How do they deal with those situations? Regular financial institutions have introduced all manner of due diligence to lessen such risks and comply with anti-money-laundering regulations. However, it is less clear wha...
Chapter
This chapter looks into the relationship between art and money laundering, or, in more neutral terms, criminal money management. Objects of art may be of interest to criminals with a surplus of criminal income. Or it can be used to launder money. It is even rumoured that organised crime specifically makes use of art to launder part of their crimina...
Article
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to broaden the discussion on trade-based money laundering (TBML). The literature is too narrowly focused on the misrepresentation of the value, quantity or quality of the traded goods. This focus leads to the analysis of price anomalies as a signal of over- or under-invoicing. However, TBML can also occur with...
Article
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In a recent study of Malm and Bichler (Trends in Organized Crime 16:365–381, 2013) it was found that very little professional laundering occurs in illicit markets. That is to be expected because not every criminal will make enough money to have a need for the services of professional money launderers. However, it is less clear to what extent the sa...
Article
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VOORPUBLICATIE ARTIKEL 'We zijn geen padvinders' Een verkennend onderzoek naar de criminele carrières van leden van 1%-motorclubs Arjan Blokland, Melvin Soudijn & Eric Teng  Gebruikmakend van gegevens uit het Justitieel Documentatie Systeem worden in dit artikel de criminele carrières in kaart gebracht van 601 door de politie als zodanig geïdentif...
Article
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Chinese organized crime has long been accused of playing an active role in the illicit usury world, except that there are no known empirical studies depicting how it is actually done. A rare opportunity arose when a Dutch police agency seized one set of financial records documenting detailed transactions of a loan shark working incognito inside a D...
Chapter
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Illegal enterprises operate in settings of risk and uncertainty very different from those in legal businesses. Not only do the state and competitors threaten their transactions and assets but they cannot make use of written contracts, settle disputes through the civil courts or obtain information as readily as their legal counterparts. It is widely...
Article
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Felson coined the term ‘offender convergence settings’ to describe certain physical locations, e.g. local tough bars, in which (potential) offenders meet each other. Here they relax with friends and acquaintances, meet new people, exchange information, sell stolen material or plan new criminal acts. The perpetrators of cybercrime also make use of s...
Article
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Criminals can use financial facilitators to invest their ill-gotten gains without drawing attention to themselves. These facilitators are experts at getting round anti-money laundering procedures. Because of their expertise and unique capabilities they play an important role in criminal networks. It therefore stands to reason that law enforcement f...
Article
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This article discusses situational crime prevention and routine activity theory as well as the application of these theories to organized crime. Furthermore, it introduces the contributions to this double special issue of Trends in Organized Crime.
Chapter
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Organized crime in the Netherlands can be characterized as cross-border crime. Criminal groups are primarily involved in illegal international trade, using the same opportunity structure that facilitates legal economic activities. For this reason, it is interesting to note that the Netherlands also acts as a major production country for the synthet...
Article
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse the complicity of wives/girlfriends of a criminal if she benefits from the proceeds of the criminal's illicit activities. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents analysis of 62 investigations into organised crime through interviews. Findings Although spouses/wives benefit from the criminal pr...
Chapter
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This paper explores the consequences of cross-border crime for situational crime prevention. Many types of organised crime involve international smuggling activities – such as drug trafficking, money laundering, smuggling illegal immigrants, and other transnational illegal activities. Based on research in the Netherlands, this paper explores cross-...
Article
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This article criticizes the 'ethnic' conception of organized crime and puts forward an alternative view that does not put ethnicity first, but rather social networks and situational context. It focuses upon Chinese organized crime, a phenomenon where the preoccupation with ethnicity is paramount, and compares findings from extensive research into t...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to generally express concern about the threat of crime‐money to the real estate sector and the lack of evidence coming forward from research and law enforcement. Design/methodology/approach In addition to a review of the literature, this research project analysed the confiscation database of the Dutch prosecuti...
Book
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Who are the smugglers of Chinese people? How is Chinese human smuggling organized in the Netherlands? Using unique and hitherto undisclosed information from court files covering the years 1996-2003, this study provides in-depth insights into of the manner in which smugglers interact and how they organize their activities. Characteristics such as th...
Article
Draft (2003) for Art Antiquity & Law, 8(2), 149-165. 'It is a melancholy observation that, although the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property was adopted as long ago as 1970, the destruction of archaeological sites through looting has increased rather t...

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