Milena MANUKYAN

Milena Manukyan is special importance case investigator of the department of investigation of cybercrime and high tech crime of the general department of investigation of special importance cases of the Investigative Committee of The Republic of Armenia. She is also a representative of 24/7 National Point of Contact established under Budapest Convention. Milena Manukyan received Master’s degree in Law from American University of Armenia. Research interests are cybercrime, organized and serious crime, transnational crime.  

Area of Expertise: cybercrime, organised crime, cryptocurrency 

https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7952-6706

Cybercrime related High-Risk Criminal networks in Armenia

The goal of this paper is to show that high-risk criminal networks increasingly take part in committing Cybercrime especially in investment frauds and phishing attacks in Armenia. HRCN especially form transnational organized crime groups, the actors of which are committing the illegal activities in different countries, by that causing difficulty of its investigation and identification of persons. The organizers and the heads of criminal organizations engage numerous people living in different countries for assisting the planned criminal activities, moreover in higher-level organized crime we can see multiple high-risk criminal networks under one organization and co-operating with each other.

The findings in this paper are based on the investigation of more than 700 cybercrime cases, including the investigation of the biggest phishing attack case in Armenia, being the head of investigation team of the criminal fraudulent transnational call center case, taking part in investigation groups and practice in international cooperation.

The main attention is drown to challenges while combatting HRCN related to cybercrime, such as diverse locationing, transnational element, using people who do no not acknowledge the nature of their actions, transformation of illegally gained assets into different types of cryptocurrency. Parallel to mentioned challenges the best practices, investigative techniques that took part and were used in Armenia are being discussed in the paper.