Stage Talks with Bellingcat “Digging for Gold in Import-Export Data” with Bellingcat's Katherine de Tolly
Dec 8, 2025
Katherine De Tolly, a research consultant at Bellingcat and expert in financial investigations, shares her insights on navigating trade data. She discusses how this data reveals illicit flows, using an intriguing case study of opioid shipments from India to West Africa. Katherine explains the challenges of data inconsistencies, the importance of corroboration, and the surprising clarity of illegal trade records. Plus, she offers practical tips for analyzing ship data while emphasizing the need for a broader understanding of global trade dynamics.
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Expect Provider Discrepancies
- Different trade providers often show divergent numbers because of varied sources, cleaning and currency conversions.
- Comparing sources helps confirm directional trends even when totals differ.
Corroborate Individual Shipments
- Corroborate single shipments with interviews or other records before publishing claims about individual trades.
- Aggregated patterns are more robust than single-record findings.
Multiple Handoffs Produce Messy Records
- Bills of lading are captured differently across countries and are often still paper-based, causing variability.
- Data passes through brokers and providers who each reformat and clean it, creating inconsistencies.