Abstract—With the evolution of the Internet, trafficking has
broader and borderless operations targeting virtual spaces
where individuals of different ages can be subjected to cyber
trafficking. Despite the government's efforts to combat cyber
trafficking, the growing number of cases is alarming. One
apparent reason is that traffickers keep advancing their
technical strategies, so it becomes more challenging for law
enforcement to investigate complex and transnational
organized crime. Thus, this paper presents the development of a
cyber monitoring and trafficking web application integrated
with a web scraper that identifies websites with a high
probability of being used in cyber trafficking activities. The web
scraper was written using Beautiful Soup. With the result of the
sensitivity analysis conducted in the study, beautiful soup was
determined to be the most suitable tool for developing web
scraping algorithms based on performance, portability, and
accuracy compared with the Scrapy and Selenium tools. Upon
the initial testing of the developed prototyped in tracking and
monitoring suspected cyber traffickers, it was able to scrape 45
potential trafficking websites. The initial testing result shows
that this kind of application integrated with a scraper to
identify cyber traffickers with a visualization dashboard can
help law enforcement officers identify, track, and monitor
online traffickers easily and quickly.
Index Terms—Beautiful soup, selenium, scrapy, cyber
trafficking, cyber trafficking monitoring application, scraping
tools, selenium, web scraping.
R. Acerado and R. Morco are with Technological Institute of the
Philippines, Quezon City, Philippines
M. C. Samaniego was with Technological Institute of the Philippines,
Quezon City, Philippines
*Correspondence: (e-mail: racerado.is@tip.edu.ph).
Cite: Risty Acerado*, Mauee Czelsie Samaniego, and Roselia Morco, "CMATA: Cyber Trafficking Monitoring and Tracking Prototype," International Journal of Future Computer and Communication vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 19-22, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).
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