- Don Fort has detailed how AI strengthens OSINT tools for detecting financial crime
- The platform converts fragmented public data into evidence-backed intelligence
- Fort said AI helps resolve identities and surface hidden dataset relationships
Don Fort, chief business officer at IVIX, said government agencies should adopt artificial intelligence-enabled open-source intelligence, or OSINT, platforms that could help convert fragmented public data into structured, actionable intelligence to detect financial crimes and other hidden economic activities.
In an article published on Carahsoft.com, Fort wrote that the shift toward digital, cross-border economic activity — including e-commerce, cryptocurrency and social media-based transactions — has made it harder for investigators to trace ownership and taxable income using traditional research methods, as the resulting digital footprint is often scattered across thousands of sources.
“Financial crime and tax non-compliance are becoming increasingly digital, distributed and complex, and so are the investigative efforts that seek to uncover them,” said Fort, former chief of the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation division.
How Does AI Enhance OSINT Platforms?
According to Fort, AI strengthens OSINT platforms largely by identifying relationships among entities and resolving identities across datasets that would otherwise remain siloed. He said the technology can surface patterns that manual review would struggle to catch, giving agencies a faster way to map out networks of people, assets, businesses and online activity.
Fort said AI serves as a supplement to human judgment rather than a substitute in these investigations. He said the strongest platforms combine AI-driven analysis with evidence that investigators can trace back to its source, letting them confirm how a given finding was reached and check it against the underlying data before relying on it.
What Is the IVIX Platform?
The IVIX platform is an AI-powered tool built to help government agencies convert publicly available information into structured, actionable investigative intelligence. It applies AI, graph analytics and advanced entity resolution to surface hidden activity and connections among individuals, businesses, assets and digital transactions, revealing financial crime and criminal networks that traditional methods often miss.
The platform draws together large volumes of unstructured public data into a single resource investigators can use to identify tax non-compliance. It generates documented evidence for audits and investigations, along with new case leads that are ranked by potential impact.
Fort said the tool is designed to replace the manual process of searching and cross-referencing numerous separate sources, giving investigators a consolidated picture of business activity, ownership, workforce presence and financial ties. That consolidated view, he said, allows agencies to make decisions more quickly and direct limited resources toward the cases with the greatest potential impact.
According to Fort, the platform’s findings remain traceable to their original public sources, supporting defensibility, transparency and responsible use of AI in government investigations.
