Mining & Resource Crime: Mission Domain Intelligence Guide

Gold laundering does not require a refinery that knows it is complicit. It requires one refinery that accepts a dore bar with a plausible piece of paper. That paper is where the investigation starts.

What Mining & Resource Crime covers as a mission domain

Mining and resource crime intelligence covers illegal extraction and the illicit trade in minerals, metals, hydrocarbons and timber, together with the licensing corruption, environmental destruction and armed-group taxation that surround it. The domain includes artisanal gold laundered into formal refining chains, conflict minerals financing armed groups, permit fraud and overlapping concessions, ore and fuel theft from producing operations, illegal alluvial mining inside protected areas, and smuggling of high-value stones. Analysts reconcile production reality with declared trade flows and trace the corporate and financial layer that legitimises the output.

Three structures recur. Mine-site control, where armed groups, security forces or criminal gangs tax diggers and control access. The laundering interface, where comptoirs, traders, exporters and refiners mix illicit with legitimate material and issue the first credible paperwork. And the enabling layer of licence-issuing officials, freight agents, assayers and commodity trading desks. Environmental crime, including mercury contamination, deforestation and tailings dumping, is inseparable from the criminal economy.

Why it matters

Resource crime funds armed groups, entrenches state capture in producing countries and deprives treasuries of royalty and tax revenue at a scale that dwarfs aid inflows. Diggers work unregulated pits with high fatality rates and widespread child labour, and downstream communities absorb mercury, siltation and displacement. Buyers and refiners face sanctions, forced-labour and money-laundering exposure. Gaps of hundreds of tonnes between plausible production and declared exports are routine in several gold-producing regions.

What analysts actually look for

These are the concrete, observable signals that carry weight in this area of work:

Declared gold exports persistently exceeding any credible domestic production estimate, with the gap absorbed by a handful of traders.
Trading companies incorporated weeks before an export spike, sharing directors or addresses with previously delisted or sanctioned exporters.
Satellite imagery showing pit expansion, sediment plumes or new access tracks inside protected areas or unlicensed concession blocks.
Concession registers containing overlapping or backdated grants, or licences issued to shell entities immediately before a discovery announcement.
Repeated airport and border seizures of undeclared dore or rough stones on the same routes with the same handling agents.
Refinery due-diligence disclosures naming supplier countries with no artisanal production history capable of the volumes claimed.
Fuel or ore volumes reconciling poorly against pipeline metering, weighbridge records or shipped tonnage at a producing site.
Mercury imports far exceeding any declared industrial use in a jurisdiction with known alluvial gold activity.

Where the data comes from

Authoritative and openly available collection points. Always confirm licensing and terms before operational or commercial use:

UN Group of Experts reports (DRC, CAR) — Mandated field investigations naming armed groups, traders and export routes for conflict-affected minerals.
EITI — Country reports reconciling declared company payments with government receipts, plus licence and ownership data.
Global Witness — Field-based investigations into logging, mining and the corporate networks profiting from illegal extraction.
Kimberley Process statistics — Rough diamond production and export volumes by participant, supporting production-versus-export gap analysis.
Global Forest Watch and MAAP — Near-real-time deforestation and mining alerts derived from optical and radar satellite imagery.
OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Minerals — The benchmark standard against which company and refiner supply chain claims can be assessed.
SEC Form SD conflict minerals filings — Issuer disclosures naming smelters, refiners and countries of origin in their supply chains.
UN Comtrade and national customs statistics — Bilateral trade mirror data exposing systematic export and import mismatches in mineral flows.

A working method

A repeatable sequence beats ad-hoc searching. This is a practical starting workflow:

Build the production baseline — Assemble licensed capacity, historic output, geology and workforce estimates so declared volumes can be tested rather than accepted.
Run mirror-trade analysis — Compare declared exports against partner-country imports by HS code and period to locate systematic gaps and the entities behind them.
Verify by remote sensing — Use time-series imagery to confirm activity, extent and encroachment at named sites, and to date the onset of change.
Trace licences and ownership — Map concession holders to registered owners, politically exposed persons and offshore vehicles, checking grant dates against political events.
Test chain of custody — Follow specific consignments through comptoirs, assayers, freight agents and refiners, identifying where documentation is first created.
Assess buyer and financial exposure — Identify banks, trading desks and end users, then evaluate each against sanctions, anti-money-laundering and forced-labour obligations.
Report with source protection — Deliver findings to regulators, refinery audit bodies, sanctions authorities or civil society partners with informant safety controls applied.

How this connects across the intelligence taxonomy

Intelligence work does not respect neat boundaries. The mission domain you are working, the disciplines you practise, and the data points you pivot on are one connected system. These are the direct relationships for this entry — every link is also a tag, so you can follow any thread across the whole library.

Practised with these disciplines

Environmental Intelligence — Environmental Conditions, Damage, and Crime
Geospatial Intelligence — Intelligence Derived from Place
Corporate Intelligence — Understanding Companies, Structure, and Control
Economic Intelligence — Economic Conditions, Trade, and Market Signals
Imagery Intelligence — Interpretation of Visual Imagery
Legal Intelligence — Law, Litigation, and Regulatory Intelligence
Sanctions Intelligence — Screening, Designations, and Evasion Detection

Worked in these data points

Facility / Site — A physical installation — plant, base, port, data centre — with a fixed footprint and function.
Location / Coordinates — A geographic point, place, or region — the basis of GEOINT analysis.
Company / Organization — A legal entity — corporation, LLC, NGO, or business.
Satellite Imagery — Overhead imagery of an area of interest, used for change detection and site analysis.
Shipment / Bill of Lading — A consignment record linking shipper, consignee, goods, and route.
HS Commodity Code — The Harmonized System code classifying a traded good — the key to trade-flow analysis.
GPS Coordinates — Precise latitude/longitude coordinates identifying an exact point on Earth — the atomic unit of GEOINT analysi

Adjacent mission domains

Inside the platform: where Mining & Resource Crime lives

The Quantus platform is 204 pages behind a 147-item sidebar organised into six working groups: Command (24 items), Dashboards (15), Threat Theaters (14), Intelligence Domains (15), Investigate (34), and Administration (45). This entry is not a page in isolation — it is a thread running through several of them.

The modules that matter most here:

domain.php?d=mining — Mining & Resource Crime dashboard
theater.php?d=mining — Threat theater view
search.php — Company / Organization profile
correlate.php — Correlation graph
cases.php — Case management

Each dashboard is local-first: it renders from the platform’s own database rather than depending on a live third-party call, so it still works when an upstream API is unreachable or rate-limited. Heavy aggregates are cached with a hard query time cap and degrade to the last good value instead of hanging the page.

Automation, playbooks and AI skills

Analysis that only happens when someone remembers to run it is not a capability. The platform ships a 30-step automation pipeline (cron.php) that collects, ingests, resolves, enriches, correlates and scores on a schedule — 25 seeders, 11 resolvers and 7 enrichment runners, all idempotent and cursor-based so a run can be interrupted and resumed without duplicating or losing work.

Relevant playbooks

Of the 14 incident playbooks in playbooks.php, these apply directly to Mining & Resource Crime:

Sanctions Screening & Escalation — a step-checked workflow with the pivots, sources and handling rules already wired in.

AI skills that apply

The 16 one-click operations in ai-skills.php are deterministic jobs, not free-text generation. The ones that matter here:

Threat Hunt
Correlate Infrastructure
Run Alert Rules
Summarise (Copilot)
Generate Report

Alerting closes the loop: rules in alerts.php fire on new indicators matching a saved query, so a first sighting in this area raises a notification rather than waiting to be noticed at the next review.

Feeds, data sources and the API

The collection layer runs a feed registry of free, machine-readable sources — bulk blocklists and trackers (Maltrail, IPsum, FireHOL, the full abuse.ch corpora, phishing databases, Emerging Threats, Spamhaus, DigitalSide, ThreatView), authoritative government feeds (CISA KEV, OFAC, UN and EU sanctions lists), and reference datasets (RIR allocations, ip-to-ASN and geolocation tables, MITRE ATT&CK, EPSS). collect.php pulls them server-side on a schedule; feeds.php and source-catalog.php show what is registered, what it covers and when it last ran.

Anything the platform holds is reachable programmatically. The REST API in api.php exposes 11 endpoints — status, stats, search, lookup, recent, export, bulk_check, top_threats, by_category, categories, check — and export.php streams 18 formats in bounded chunks, so a million-row export neither exhausts memory nor times out:

STIX 2.1, MISP, OpenIOC 1.1, CEF (ArcSight), LEEF 2.0 (QRadar), Zeek/Bro intel, Snort/Suricata rules, Palo Alto EDL, BIND RPZ, hosts blackhole, iptables, CSV, JSON, NDJSON/JSONL, XML.

That covers the CTI standards (STIX 2.1, MISP, OpenIOC), SIEM ingestion (CEF, LEEF, Zeek), detection engines (Snort/Suricata), and direct enforcement (Palo Alto EDL, BIND RPZ, hosts, iptables) — so intelligence developed here can be actioned in the tools you already run, without a manual reformatting step. A TAXII 2.1 server and a MISP/RSS feed are also served for pull-based sharing.

Use cases

Three ways this entry earns its keep in day-to-day work:

Triage under time pressure. An artifact or report lands and you need a defensible read in minutes, not days. Build the production baseline is the first move; the platform pre-computes the enrichment so the analyst spends the time on judgement rather than lookups.
Building the picture. A single indicator is rarely the story. Verify by remote sensing turns one artifact into a network — shared infrastructure, repeated selectors, the same operator behind different names — via the correlation graph and the cross-entity link engine.
Producing something actionable. Analysis that ends in a document nobody can use is wasted. Report with source protection feeds the case file, the detection rule, the block list or the referral — with sourcing attached so the recipient can verify it.

Case management (cases.php), watchlists, saved searches and scheduled reports mean the work persists between sessions and survives an analyst leaving the team.

How each sector uses Mining & Resource Crime

The same entry is worked very differently depending on who you are, what authority you hold, and what you are ultimately producing. A military analyst is supporting a commander’s decision; a journalist is meeting a publication standard; an NGO caseworker is protecting a person. The underlying artifacts are shared — the constraints, outputs and thresholds are not.

🎖 Military and defence

For defence analysts, mine-site economies are a conflict-financing and control indicator. Mapping which armed actor taxes which site, and how output moves to market, supports assessment of an opponent's revenue resilience, predicts where competition for terrain will occur, and informs force protection for any deployment near extraction areas. It also feeds stabilisation planning, because livelihoods dependent on artisanal mining shape local consent. Products typically support IPB overlays, pattern-of-life around access roads and airstrips, and non-kinetic effects planning aimed at revenue rather than personnel. Constraints include the presence of large civilian workforces on sites, which makes anything resembling economic targeting legally and ethically fraught, and requires careful proportionality analysis.

🕵 National intelligence

National intelligence interest centres on sanctioned gold flows, conflict mineral revenue reaching designated groups, state-linked extraction used for influence, and the trading houses and refiners that convert illicit material into monetary value. Requirements ask who profits at the refining and financing tier, not who digs. All-source work fuses satellite production evidence, customs and mirror trade data, corporate registries, financial intelligence and human reporting from the corridor. Handling is complicated by commercial sensitivity, since much of the evidence concerns named companies in allied jurisdictions. Dissemination priorities are sanctions designation processes, customs and financial regulators, and diplomatic reporting on resource-linked influence operations.

👮 Law enforcement

Enforcement usually attacks the laundering interface rather than the mine. Charges commonly involve smuggling, customs fraud, forgery of certificates of origin, money laundering and, where applicable, environmental offences. Evidence requirements include seized material with assay results and secure chain of custody, export documentation, refinery intake records and payment traces, most of which require production orders and mutual legal assistance across at least two jurisdictions. Isotopic and trace-element analysis can support origin claims but must be presented with its uncertainty. Charging decisions frequently rest on the documentary fraud, which is provable, rather than on the underlying origin of the material, which often is not.

🔍 Private investigation and corporate security

Corporate and due-diligence work covers supplier assessment for refiners, traders and manufacturers, joint venture screening, litigation support and asset tracing in resource disputes. The deliverable is a supply-chain risk assessment naming counterparties, jurisdictions and specific red flags, benchmarked against the OECD due diligence framework. A private actor may not bribe officials for licence records, deploy surveillance on communities, use drones unlawfully over sites, or misrepresent themselves to obtain company data. Care is needed where clients want a report that discharges their obligation rather than establishes the facts; a due diligence file that only records the absence of adverse media is not diligence and will not survive scrutiny.

📰 Journalism and OSINT media

Investigations here reward reconciliation work: declared production against declared exports, exports against partner-country imports, and both against what imagery shows on the ground. Verify company denials against filings and customs records rather than reporting them as balance. Protect sources absolutely, since miners, local officials and comptoir staff face violence, and refinery insiders face immediate dismissal. Corroborate any claim linking a specific refiner to specific illicit material with documentation, because attribution at the refining tier attracts serious litigation. Give named companies a detailed right of reply. Consider the effect of publication on communities whose only income is the site in question, and report the livelihood dimension rather than erasing it.

🌍 NGO, humanitarian and human rights

Civil society organisations document environmental destruction, mercury exposure, child labour, forced displacement and armed taxation, and use the findings for advocacy, litigation and community redress. Practice should be community-led, with consent for use of testimony and clear explanation of the risks of visibility. Do-no-harm means recognising that enforcement can destroy the only livelihood available and pushing for formalisation and remediation alongside enforcement. Documentation should meet evidentiary standards usable in strategic litigation and in home-state grievance mechanisms. Duty of care extends to community documenters and local partners, who remain in place after the report is published and carry the retaliation risk.

🎓 University and research

Research spans resource economics, political ecology, remote sensing and criminology. Methodology must confront the fact that production, trade and price data are all systematically misreported, so mirror analysis, imagery-derived production estimates and ethnographic work each correct different biases and should be triangulated. Ethics approval is required for fieldwork near armed actors, with explicit protocols for consent, anonymisation and researcher extraction. Reproducibility is served by publishing imagery classification methods, training data and code, and by depositing anonymised interview coding rather than transcripts. Site coordinates should be generalised in publication where precise locations would expose communities or attract incursion.

Playbook: working Mining & Resource Crime end to end

A repeatable sequence, from the moment the requirement lands to the moment a product is delivered and the case is closed out. Each phase states what you are trying to establish, not merely what to click — the point is a defensible chain of reasoning, not a checklist.

Phase 1 — Fix the commodity and the chain

Establish exactly which material is in scope, its physical forms at each stage, and how a legitimate unit travels from pit to market: who buys at site, who consolidates, who exports, who refines and who trades. Identify the documents generated at each handover, because those documents are the investigative surface. Output is a chain diagram naming actual document types and issuing authorities. Stop when you can state what paperwork should exist for a lawful consignment at every step.

Phase 2 — Establish declared production reality

Collect official production statistics, licence registers, concession maps, company reporting and where available EITI disclosures. Note the reporting lag and the known quality problems in each dataset. This is the baseline against which everything else is compared, and its weaknesses must be documented rather than assumed away. Stop when you have a defensible statement of what the state says was produced, by whom, under what licence, and how confident you are in it.

Phase 3 — Observe physical production

Use satellite imagery to measure pit area, spoil volume, processing infrastructure, machinery presence and access-road development over time. Convert observed activity into plausible production ranges rather than point estimates. Overlay concession boundaries and protected area boundaries. The output is an independent production and encroachment picture. Stop when the imagery-derived range no longer changes materially with additional scenes.

Phase 4 — Run mirror trade analysis

Compare declared exports from the producing country with declared imports of the same commodity in destination countries, by year and partner. Persistent large asymmetries, particularly for gold moving to refining and trading hubs, indicate volumes leaving outside the declared system. Account for known statistical artefacts such as valuation differences and transit reporting before drawing conclusions. Output is a quantified discrepancy with the confounders addressed explicitly.

Phase 5 — Identify the laundering interface

Focus on where illicit material first receives credible paperwork: comptoirs, licensed exporters, assayers, refiners and free-zone traders. Establish ownership, licensing history, throughput capacity and whether declared intake is physically plausible for the premises. This tier is where the crime becomes provable, because it involves regulated entities that keep records. Stop when you can name the entities whose declared intake exceeds any credible legitimate supply.

Phase 6 — Map licences and concessions

Examine the licence register for overlapping concessions, licences issued to entities incorporated days before award, transfers shortly after grant, and holders with no operational capacity. Cross-reference holders against politically exposed persons and company registries. Licence corruption is frequently the enabling act for everything downstream, and the registry evidence is usually public. Output is a list of anomalous grants with the supporting documents attached.

Phase 7 — Trace the corporate and financial layer

Resolve exporters, traders and refiners into ownership graphs, including offshore holding entities, and identify the banks, trade finance providers and insurers involved. Look for payment routing inconsistent with the declared trade, and for prepayment structures that finance production off the books. Stop when you can connect a named beneficiary to a specific consignment or revenue stream with documentary support.

Phase 8 — Document environmental and human harm

Record deforestation, river turbidity, mercury use and tailings failures from imagery and field evidence, and document occupational and community health impacts, child labour and forced displacement through properly consented testimony. This is not a separate story; it is the harm that justifies intervention and often the fastest regulatory lever. Output is a harm annex with method, dates and sources for every claim.

Phase 9 — Assess armed actor involvement

Determine whether an armed group, security force unit or criminal organisation controls access, taxes production, or operates the site. Use incident data, imagery of checkpoints and camps, and corroborated local reporting. Distinguish taxation from ownership and both from occasional predation, because the disruption options differ entirely. Stop when the control relationship is characterised with named actors and evidence, not inferred from geography alone.

Phase 10 — Test against the due diligence standard

Benchmark the identified actors against the applicable framework, typically the OECD guidance for minerals from conflict-affected and high-risk areas, plus scheme-specific rules such as refiner responsible sourcing programmes. Identify precisely which control failed and at which company. This converts an investigative finding into an actionable compliance failure that a regulator, auditor or downstream buyer must respond to.

Phase 11 — Package for the right lever

Match findings to the instrument: sanctions designation nomination, customs referral, suspicious activity report, refiner delisting from an industry programme, import ban, strategic litigation, or a buyer engagement demanding remediation. Each needs different evidence and different framing. Output is a set of separate packages rather than one report, each written to the recipient's threshold.

Phase 12 — Monitor displacement and re-routing

After any intervention, watch for the flow moving rather than stopping: a new transit country, a new refiner, a different commodity form such as dore to semi-refined, or reclassification under a different customs code. Re-routing is the normal outcome and detecting it quickly is the difference between a disruption and a headline. Register the new indicators in continuous monitoring.

The platform ships this as a step-checked workflow in playbooks.php, so progress is recorded against a case rather than held in someone’s head.

Source register: what to collect from, and how

Sources are listed with their access model so you can plan around cost and licensing before you build a dependency on them. Open means no account required; registration means a free account or API key; licensed means paid or institutional access. Always confirm current terms — licensing changes, and a source that was free for research may not be free for commercial or evidential use.

Source	Access	What it gives you	How it is used here
EITI country reports and data	Open	Standardised disclosures of licences, production, revenue flows and beneficial ownership in implementing resource-producing countries.	Establishes the declared baseline for production, licence holders and government revenue against which discrepancies are measured.
UN Comtrade	Registration	Bilateral merchandise trade statistics by commodity code, reported by both exporting and importing countries.	Supports mirror analysis of declared exports against partner-country imports to quantify undeclared outflows.
OECD due diligence guidance for minerals	Open	The recognised five-step framework for responsible mineral supply chains from conflict-affected and high-risk areas.	Provides the benchmark against which company controls are assessed and specific failures identified.
LBMA Good Delivery and responsible sourcing programme	Open	Standards and accredited refiner list governing gold entering the London bullion market, with responsible sourcing requirements.	Identifies which refiners are accountable to a recognised scheme and whose delisting is a real commercial sanction.
Responsible Minerals Initiative	Registration	Industry conformance programme covering smelters and refiners of tin, tantalum, tungsten, gold and cobalt.	Establishes downstream buyer obligations and which processing facilities are in or out of conformance.
Kimberley Process	Open	Intergovernmental certification scheme for rough diamonds with participant statistics on production and trade.	Provides the certification framework and comparative production and export statistics for diamond-producing states.
UN Panel and Group of Experts reports	Open	Investigative reporting mandated by Security Council committees on resource financing of armed groups and sanctions violations.	Supplies named entity findings and methodology precedent on mineral revenue reaching sanctioned actors.
USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries	Open	Annual global production, reserve and trade estimates by commodity and country from the US Geological Survey.	Provides independent production benchmarks to test whether declared national output is physically plausible.
Global Forest Watch	Open	Near-real-time forest loss and disturbance alerts derived from satellite data, with protected area layers.	Detects mining encroachment into protected areas and dates the onset of new clearance around sites.
Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem	Registration	Free Sentinel optical and radar imagery with frequent revisit across all producing regions.	Builds the time series for pit expansion, processing infrastructure and river sediment plumes without licensing cost.
Planet and commercial high-resolution imagery	Licensed	Daily or near-daily high-resolution optical imagery suitable for identifying machinery, camps and checkpoints.	Confirms site-level detail such as excavator counts, sluice construction and armed presence at access points.
Global Witness investigations	Open	Long-running investigative reporting on resource corruption, conflict minerals and the trading and refining tier.	Provides documented case precedent on laundering methods and named intermediaries in specific corridors.
Natural Resource Governance Institute	Open	Research and indices on resource governance quality, licensing practice and state-owned enterprise transparency.	Assesses the institutional environment and identifies which governance controls are absent in a producing state.
OpenCorporates and national registries	Registration	Aggregated company registry data with officers, addresses and filing histories across many jurisdictions.	Resolves exporters, comptoirs and offshore holding entities into ownership graphs linked to licence holders.
Trase supply chain data	Open	Supply chain mapping linking production regions to exporters, traders and importing markets for commodity flows.	Connects production geography to specific trading companies and destination markets for forest-risk commodities.
Minamata Convention resources	Open	Treaty framework and national reporting on mercury use, including artisanal and small-scale gold mining action plans.	Establishes the legal and reporting position on mercury use and the state obligations that follow from it.

Prefer sources that publish a methodology and a revision history. A dataset that changes silently is a liability in any product that has to survive challenge.

Tooling

Tools commonly used against Mining & Resource Crime. None of these replace judgement, and each carries its own failure modes — know what a tool infers versus what it observes.

QGIS with satellite imagery plugins — Measures pit area, clearance and infrastructure change over time against concession layers. Limitation: production conversion from area is highly assumption-dependent and easy to overstate.
Google Earth Engine — Processes long imagery time series at scale for change detection over mining regions. Limitation: requires coding competence and careful validation against ground truth.
Global Forest Watch alerts — Flags new clearance events including mining encroachment into protected areas. Limitation: cannot distinguish mining from agriculture or logging without visual confirmation.
UN Comtrade extraction and mirror analysis scripts — Compares reported export and import flows by commodity and partner. Limitation: code changes, transit reporting and valuation differences generate artefacts that mimic smuggling.
OpenCorporates and registry scrapers — Builds ownership graphs across trading, export and holding entities. Limitation: beneficial ownership is unavailable in most producing and trading jurisdictions.
Isotopic and trace element assay — Laboratory analysis narrowing the geological origin of a metal or stone sample. Limitation: needs reference databases for candidate sources, which exist for few regions.
Aleph by OCCRP — Cross-searches leaks, registries and documents for traders, refiners and officials. Limitation: coverage is thin for exactly the jurisdictions where comptoirs operate.
ACLED and conflict event data — Establishes armed actor presence and violence patterns around extraction sites. Limitation: event reporting density varies with media access, understating remote sites.
Sentinel radar imagery — Detects change through cloud cover, which is decisive in tropical mining regions. Limitation: interpretation requires specialist skill and validation against optical scenes.

AI skills and automation in detail

These are deterministic jobs with defined inputs and outputs, not open-ended prompting. Each is idempotent and cursor-based: interrupt one and it resumes where it stopped rather than duplicating work or losing progress.

Threat Hunt — Runs saved hypotheses against the corpus and surfaces what matches, with the query preserved as a versioned artifact.
Correlate Infrastructure — Builds the cross-entity link graph: shared hosting, reused certificates, overlapping registrants, repeated selectors.
Run Alert Rules — Evaluates saved rules against new data so a first sighting raises a notification rather than waiting for review.
Summarise (Copilot) — Produces a narrative summary beside the underlying records. It explains; it never creates indicators or assigns attribution.
Generate Report — Assembles a sourced product from the current case or query, with provenance attached to each element.

A note on the boundary: the only skill that involves a language model is Summarise (Copilot), and it writes prose about records that already exist. Nothing else on this list involves generation of any kind. No indicator, relationship or attribution in the platform originates from a model. See the full skill list.

Tradecraft notes

The distinctions that separate a competent analyst from a fast one:

Reconcile three numbers, not one: declared production, declared export, and partner-country import. Any single figure can be argued away, but a persistent triangular inconsistency across several years is extremely difficult for a state or a trader to explain innocently.
The refinery is the chokepoint, not the mine. There are thousands of sites and a manageable number of facilities capable of turning dore into deliverable metal, and those facilities are regulated, insured, audited and commercially vulnerable in a way that a pit never is.
Treat an intake volume that exceeds any plausible legitimate supply in the catchment as the finding. You rarely have to prove a specific consignment was illicit if you can show a facility declared intake that the region demonstrably could not have produced lawfully.
Distinguish armed taxation from armed ownership. A group levying a toll on output has a revenue interest that collapses if the site closes, while a group operating the site has a logistics footprint, both of which imply different disruption options and different civilian consequences.
Imagery-derived production estimates are ranges, and the assumptions dominate the result. Publish the conversion assumptions with the estimate, because the first serious challenge will attack the depth, density and recovery figures rather than the imagery.
Watch commodity form changes after enforcement. Flows re-route by shifting from dore to semi-refined, or by reclassifying under an adjacent customs code, long before they shift geographically, so monitor code-level import data rather than headline tonnages.
Licence registers are underused. Incorporation dates, transfer timing and directorship overlaps in the concession register frequently document the corrupt grant more clearly than any financial trace, and the material is usually public and citable.
Never let the livelihood dimension drop out of the analysis. Artisanal mining supports very large numbers of people, and a product recommending enforcement without addressing formalisation and remediation will be correct and useless, or worse, will displace harm onto the workforce.

Measuring whether it is working

Capability claims should be falsifiable. These are the measures that show whether work on Mining & Resource Crime is producing anything, and they are worth baselining before you change process or tooling.

Size and direction of the mirror-trade discrepancy for the corridor over time, tracked as the headline outcome measure rather than counts of reports produced.
Number of processing or refining entities where declared intake has been shown to exceed plausible legitimate supply, with supporting documentation.
Proportion of anomalous licence grants identified that lead to review, revocation or prosecution by the issuing state.
Detected re-routing interval after an enforcement action, measured as time to identify the replacement corridor, refiner or customs code.
Area of protected land under active mining encroachment, tracked from imagery, and its trend after intervention.
Share of downstream buyers who change sourcing or impose remediation requirements following a supplied finding.
Proportion of harm documentation collected with recorded informed consent and no reported retaliation against contributors.

Beware of measuring volume alone. Indicator counts and report counts rise easily and say little; time-to-attribution, proportion of findings that survive review, and how often a product changed a decision say a great deal.

Common pitfalls

Reading trade mirror gaps as proof of smuggling when valuation differences, timing lags and re-export accounting produce the same signature.
Assuming artisanal means illegal; much artisanal production is licensed, and criminalising it harms the communities you intend to protect.
Attributing satellite-visible pits to a named company without ground truth, since concession maps and actual operators frequently diverge.
Treating refiner membership of an industry body as evidence of clean sourcing rather than as a due-diligence commitment to be tested.
Underestimating security risk to local sources, as naming a site can expose informants to the armed actors controlling it.

Legal and ethical considerations

Sourcing from mine sites involves genuine physical risk to informants and researchers, so consent, anonymisation and secure communications are operational necessities rather than formalities. Allegations against listed miners and refiners are market-sensitive and defamation-exposed, so separate documented findings from inference. Conflict-minerals regimes generally impose disclosure and due-diligence duties rather than outright prohibitions, and indigenous land rights frameworks, including free, prior and informed consent, may be the governing standard rather than mining law alone.

Data integrity: no fabrication, no drift, no hallucination

Intelligence that cannot be traced back to a source is not intelligence, it is assertion. Everything in this entry — and everything in the platform behind it — is built on a small number of non-negotiable rules.

Provenance on every record

Every indicator carries the source that supplied it, a first-seen and last-seen timestamp, and a sighting count. Where several feeds report the same artifact, each contribution is recorded separately rather than collapsed, so you can see whether a finding rests on one source or twelve. Source attribution travels with the data into every export, so a recipient can audit a claim without asking you for the working.

Nothing is invented to fill a gap

If the platform has no data for Mining & Resource Crime, it says so. Empty is displayed as empty — never padded with plausible-looking placeholder values, sample records or illustrative examples that a reader might mistake for observations. A dashboard with no rows is a true statement about collection coverage, and it is treated as a gap to close, not a blemish to hide.

Scoring is deterministic and reproducible

Threat scores, reputation grades and risk tiers are computed from stated inputs with fixed weights, not estimated. The same inputs always produce the same output, and the formula is visible rather than a black box. Aggregates are cached with an explicit time-to-live so a figure on screen is never silently stale — and when a heavy query exceeds its time budget the platform serves the last known-good value and labels it, rather than inventing a fresh number or hanging.

Where AI is used, and where it is not

Language models summarise and explain. They do not create indicators, assign attribution or manufacture relationships. No IP address, wallet, hash or identity in the platform originates from a model — every one is ingested from a named feed, resolved from a reference dataset, or entered by an analyst with a source recorded. Copilot output is presented as narrative alongside the underlying records, never in place of them, so a reader can always check the summary against the evidence.

Guarding against drift

Enrichment is additive and timestamped rather than overwriting. Reference data — sanctions lists, allocations, taxonomies — is re-synchronised from the authority on a schedule instead of being edited in place, so local copies cannot quietly diverge from the source of truth. Attribution is recorded with a confidence level and the reporting it rests on, and inferred relationships are labelled as inferred. When a source retracts or corrects, the correction propagates rather than leaving a stale assertion behind.

What this means for you

You can put a finding from this platform in front of a regulator, a court, a board or a partner agency and show where each element came from. That is the standard the tooling is built to — because in this work, being confidently wrong is more damaging than being usefully uncertain.

By the numbers

The taxonomy this entry belongs to is not a marketing list — it is the actual structure of the platform: 52 mission domains, 52 intelligence disciplines and 65 data points, each with a live dashboard behind it. Supporting that: 18 indicator types, 14 playbooks, 16 AI skills, 18 export formats and a 30-step automated pipeline.

This particular entry connects directly to 7 intelligence disciplines, 7 data points, 6 closely related entries — every one of them a tag you can follow, and a dashboard you can open.

Questions analysts actually ask

Why does gold dominate this domain?

Because gold is uniquely well suited to laundering. It is dense, high value per unit weight, chemically indistinguishable from other gold once refined, easy to smuggle in small volumes, and it enters a formal market that will accept it with minimal documentation at the right point in the chain. Once dore is refined and cast, origin is effectively erased for commercial purposes, and isotopic analysis is not routinely applied. Add strong retail demand, informal dealing networks and free-zone trading hubs with light supervision, and you have an ideal instrument for converting illicit revenue into internationally acceptable value.

How reliable is mirror trade analysis?

Useful as an indicator, weak as proof on its own. Legitimate causes of asymmetry include valuation on different bases, transit and re-export reporting, timing differences at year end, and inconsistent commodity coding. A single year's gap proves nothing. What is persuasive is a large gap that persists across several years, in one direction, for one commodity and one partner pair, and that grows or moves in response to a known event such as an export ban. Always state the confounders you have considered, because the first response from any government will be a technical explanation of the discrepancy.

Can laboratory analysis prove where a metal came from?

It can narrow it, not fix it. Trace element and isotopic signatures reflect the geology of the deposit, so a sample can be compared against reference material from candidate sources. The limitations are serious: reference databases exist for relatively few deposits, refining and mixing destroy or blend signatures, and artisanal material is frequently amalgamated before it reaches anyone who could sample it. Presented properly, with uncertainty stated, it is powerful corroboration for a documentary case. Presented as a fingerprint that identifies a mine, it will not survive cross-examination.

What actually changes company behaviour?

Loss of access to a market or a scheme. Delisting from a recognised responsible sourcing programme, exclusion from a bullion market's good delivery list, loss of a bank relationship or an import prohibition all impose immediate commercial cost. Adverse media alone rarely moves a trading company, and audit findings that stay inside a certification process almost never do. The practical implication for analysts is to write findings so they map directly onto a specific scheme rule or a regulator's power, naming the control that failed, rather than producing a narrative that leaves the reader to work out what to do.

How do you avoid harming artisanal miners with your findings?

Design the recommendation set around formalisation, not only interdiction. Artisanal and small-scale mining is the primary livelihood for millions of people, and enforcement that closes sites without alternatives pushes workers into more dangerous, more exploitative and less visible operations. Separate the analysis of the criminal and armed layer from the analysis of the workforce, document mercury exposure and child labour as harms to be remediated rather than as offences by miners, and be explicit in the product about the predictable consequences of the interventions you propose.

Where does this domain overlap with sanctions work?

Substantially, and increasingly. Gold and other minerals are used to generate revenue for sanctioned states and armed groups and to move value outside the banking system, so mineral analysis frequently produces sanctions designation nominations, and sanctions listings frequently reshape mineral corridors. The practical overlap is at the trading and refining tier, where the same entities appear in both workstreams. Analysts should screen every trader, refiner and financier surfaced in a minerals case against the relevant designation lists as a matter of routine, and should expect the corridor to move rather than close after any listing.

Standards, frameworks and further reading

Work that references a recognised framework is easier to defend, easier to hand over, and easier for a partner to consume:

OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas, the recognised five-step framework for the sector.
EITI Standard, which sets disclosure requirements for licences, contracts, production, revenues and beneficial ownership in implementing countries.
Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, governing international trade in rough diamonds through participant certification.
LBMA Responsible Sourcing Programme and Good Delivery rules, which condition access to the London bullion market on refiner due diligence.
Minamata Convention on Mercury, which governs mercury use including in artisanal and small-scale gold mining, with national action plan obligations.
EU Conflict Minerals Regulation and the US Dodd-Frank Act section on conflict minerals, imposing supply chain due diligence and disclosure duties on importers and issuers.
UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which frame corporate responsibility to identify and remediate adverse impacts in the chain.
ILO Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour, which is directly engaged by conditions on many artisanal sites.

References

Primary sources and authoritative references for this entry. Publishers revise and retire material, so treat the retrieval date as part of the citation and re-check before relying on any of it in a formal product.

Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Mineral Supply Chains — OECD. The reference framework for company controls on conflict-affected mineral sourcing.
EITI Standard and country disclosures — Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Standardised reporting on licences, production and revenue flows in producing states.
Group of Experts reporting on resource financing — UN Security Council. Mandated investigations documenting mineral revenue reaching armed groups.
Mineral Commodity Summaries — US Geological Survey. Independent annual estimates of world production and reserves by commodity.
Responsible Sourcing Programme and Good Delivery List — London Bullion Market Association. Refiner accreditation and sourcing standards controlling access to the bullion market.
Investigations into conflict minerals and resource corruption — Global Witness. Documented case research on laundering routes and named trading intermediaries.
Resource Governance Index — Natural Resource Governance Institute. Comparative assessment of licensing, revenue and state enterprise transparency.
Minamata Convention national reporting — UN Environment Programme. Treaty framework and country reporting on mercury use in artisanal gold mining.
Forest loss alerts and protected area layers — Global Forest Watch, World Resources Institute. Satellite-derived clearance detection used to identify mining encroachment.

Link integrity: every reference above was verified with a live request when this page was generated. Where a publisher had moved or withdrawn a document, the link was repointed at a preserved copy in the Internet Archive and marked as archived. Anything with no reachable copy anywhere had its link removed rather than left to rot — the source is still credited, it simply cannot be linked.

Put it into practice

The Quantus Intel threat intelligence platform operationalises this entry: reconciles declared production, trade flows and satellite reality to expose where illicit material enters the chain. Explore the platform, or browse the rest of the library by following any tag above.