Illicit Trade and Sanctions Evasion in Strategic Goods:
Constructing a Crime Script from Court Documents

Crime scripts have been used to break down complex criminal acts into sequences of actions and decision points, which used to identify common behaviors and practical intervention points to disrupt crimes in progress. Crime scripts have been employed to study a wide-range of crimes, such as illicit drug trafficking, wildlife poaching, and illegal waste disposal, but not illicit trade in dualuse goods to this point. This study seeks to create a practical crime script using 66 court cases from around the world involving illegal trade in strategic goods and sanctions evasion. Through these open-sources, the crime will be broken down into individual Acts that highlight common decision points that bad actors must consider to successfully complete the crime. These commonalities will be used to highlight global patterns in nuclear-related, dual-use trade and identify key intervention points for providers and authorities to disrupt these attempts. This paper provides a baseline and jumping off point for integrating crime analysis techniques and crime script analysis into strategic trade control enforcement efforts.