Detecting Illicit Massage Businesses by Leveraging Graph Machine Learning

Garg, Vasuki; Özaltın, Osman Y.; Mayorga, Maria E.; Bosisto, Sherrie

doi:10.24963/ijcai.2025/1072

Detecting Illicit Massage Businesses by Leveraging Graph Machine Learning

Vasuki Garg, Osman Y. Özaltın, Maria E. Mayorga, Sherrie Bosisto

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AI and Social Good. Pages 9647-9655.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1072

Keywords

Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: General
Natural Language Processing: General
Machine Learning: General
Data Mining: General

Abstract

Thousands of Illicit Massage Businesses (IMBs) are estimated to be operating in the United States by disguising themselves as legitimate establishments while exploiting trafficked workers, harming both the victims and the massage industry. The increasing digital presence of these illicit businesses presents an opportunity for detection, a crucial task for law enforcement and social service agencies aiming to disrupt their operations. Our research leverages user-generated business reviews from Yelp.com, enriched with data from multiple sources, including RubMaps.ch, U.S. Census records, GIS data, and licensing information. We present a feasibility study of developing a graph convolutional network (GCN) for a novel application and exploring its benefits and drawbacks in identifying IMBs. The novelty of our approach lies in its ability to link and analyze businesses, reviews, and reviewers within a heterogeneous network and employ a relational GCN to capture their complex relationships.

Vasuki Garg, Osman Y. Özaltın, Maria E. Mayorga, and Sherrie Bosisto. 2025. Detecting Illicit Massage Businesses by Leveraging Graph Machine Learning. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25. IJCAI, 9647–9655. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1072

@inproceedings{ijcai2025p1072,
  title     = {Detecting Illicit Massage Businesses by Leveraging Graph Machine Learning},
  author    = {Garg, Vasuki and Özaltın, Osman Y. and Mayorga, Maria E. and Bosisto, Sherrie},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-25}},
  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization},
  editor    = {James Kwok},
  pages     = {9647--9655},
  year      = {2025},
  month     = {8},
  note      = {AI and Social Good},
  doi       = {10.24963/ijcai.2025/1072},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1072},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Detecting Illicit Massage Businesses by Leveraging Graph Machine Learning
AU  - Garg, Vasuki
AU  - Özaltın, Osman Y.
AU  - Mayorga, Maria E.
AU  - Bosisto, Sherrie
T2  - Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25
PB  - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization
PY  - 2025
SP  - 9647
EP  - 9655
DO  - 10.24963/ijcai.2025/1072
UR  - https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1072
ER  -