Product tracking gains ground as anti-crime strategy
Rubens Benini
Divulgação
Technologies and systems that track the movement of goods, cross-reference information from different databases, and establish product provenance are strengthening efforts to combat illicit trade. Applications range from recovering stolen cargo and vehicles to identifying the origin of gold and timber.
“Following the product is beginning to become as important as following the money,” said compliance consultant Jorge Pontes. According to Pontes, incorporating traceability mechanisms into products and services from the design stage is part of the “anti-crime by design” concept, which seeks to identify in advance vulnerabilities that could be exploited for illegal activities.
At Nstech, which provides supply-chain and logistics services, the process begins before the goods are dispatched, with checks on drivers, vehicles, and carriers. The company then monitors both the vehicle and cargo in transit, using “bait” devices—sensors placed inside packages—for tracking. The process continues through document reconciliation, with a system that automatically cross-checks documents and the physical transportation record to identify inconsistencies without relying on manual inspection.
“The more checkpoints there are between the origin and destination of goods, the smaller the window for them to ‘disappear’ from the legal supply chain or enter it without a documentary trail,” said Cristiano Tanganelli, Nstech’s vice president of market intelligence.
In the vehicle market, location systems have long been used to recover stolen property. Grupo Tracker monitors 200,000 vehicles in Brazil, ranging from motorcycles to trucks, for individuals, insurers, carriers, and shippers.
The company combines GPS, sensors that detect events such as doors being opened, immobilizers, and devices that transmit signals even when frequency jammers are used. This allowed it to recover 857 vehicles worth R$109.8 million in the first half of this year. Its intelligence center is supported by field teams using cars and aircraft equipped with antennas to detect signals from stolen vehicles, after which the police are called in to recover them. “The average recovery rate is 80%,” CEO Alvaro Velasco said.
Neo4J’s graph technology—a database designed to store and query complex, interconnected data—can cross-reference and analyze relationships among different points in a product’s distribution chain, including companies, individuals, vehicles, tax documents, payments, routes, and points of origin and destination.
Using multiple sources, ranging from Federal Revenue Service information to lists of terrorists and fraudsters, makes it possible to identify patterns, areas with a high incidence of theft, people involved, escape routes, illegal practices by employees, and networks of companies indirectly connected through their ownership structures. “The same procedure is used to detect illegal conduct in public procurement,” said Paulo Farias, vice president of Neo4J Latin America.
BAT Brasil is among the companies using the technology. In a statement, the cigarette manufacturer noted that illegal cigarettes accounted for 31% of the Brazilian market in 2025, according to data from Ipsos-Ipec, and said it takes preventive and collaborative action in response. Its strategy combines traceability, data analysis, logistics security, and cooperation with authorities to better understand the logistics chain associated with the illicit market.
Technologies such as graph analysis make it possible to cross-reference information from official sources, law enforcement agencies, and the press to identify links among cargo theft, diversions, routes, companies, and irregular business transactions. “This integrated analysis makes it possible to produce impact studies, map critical areas, and support prevention, inspection, recovery, and remediation measures in partnership with the authorities,” the company said.
Marina Brecht, a criminal defense attorney and researcher at the Esfera Institute, said integrating federal and state tax-collection data would also help curb illegal practices such as customs evasion. Importing goods without paying taxes often relies on practices such as underinvoicing and document falsification to make products appear legitimate when they reach retailers. Detecting this practice requires cross-referencing tax, commercial, and logistics information, which is not yet done systematically.
The tax reform is expected to aid that effort by adding a new layer of traceability to business transactions through the automatic separation of the tax portion when a transaction is financially settled, known as split payment. “If properly cross-referenced, the resulting data will help uncover the organized fraud behind this distorted market,” Brecht said.
Progress is also being made in sensitive markets. Measures adopted for gold include ending buyers’ good-faith declarations, which created a loophole allowing gold from artisanal mines to enter the formal market without certification of origin, and introducing electronic invoices, eliminating manually issued documents that were easier to falsify. “These two factors caused officially reported production of artisanal gold to fall 81% between 2022 and 2025,” said Larissa Rodrigues, research director at Instituto Escolhas. A traceability system established under Bill 3025 of 2023, approved by the Chamber of Deputies (Brazil’s Lower House), has yet to begin operating. It will consolidate data from extraction through the final sale.
In the timber industry, the Forest Fingerprints project is developing Timber ID, a platform for isotopic analysis based on 964 tree samples from 64 locations in the Amazon. The initiative is a partnership involving The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Imaflora, Google, and the University of São Paulo’s Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture (Cena-USP).
“Isotopes, a kind of chemical fingerprint, indicate the region where the timber was harvested,” said Rubens Benini, TNC’s director of forests. Although still on a limited scale, Brazil’s Federal Police, an agency similar to the FBI, and the federal environmental agency Ibama already cross-reference the resulting data with the Forest Origin Document (DOF), a license issued by the Environment Ministry for transporting and storing forest products.
Translation: Todd Harkin
