Sugartrail is a work-in-progress network analysis tool and workflow that helps researchers to use a suspicious company director to discover other suspicious companies, directors and locations through Companies House.

The workflow is based on the following observations:

suspicious directors often have many active appointments registered to multiple historic addresses
addresses with many registered businesses can contain multiple scam businesses

Requirements

You will require an API key from Companies House to authenticate with the API. First you will need to create a live application to get an API key which you can do by following the Companies House guide. You will then need to manually hard-code the API key inside the sugartrail.py script as the value for access_token.

Installation

Make sure you have Conda installed
Download the tool's repository using the command:

git clone https://github.com/ribenamaplesyrup/sugartrail.git

Navigate to the main directory and run:

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate candystore

Usage

A walkthrough of how to use the tool is included in the linked Jupyter notebook showing how we can get from suspicious Candy Stores of Oxford Street to several prolific scammers.