Abstract: Law enforcement personnel have found illegal purchases of ephedrine-containing products are difficult to control due to limitations in analyzing the available data. The within invention breaks through these limitations and addresses multi-purchaser activity over a set geographic area. This allows law enforcement to stay ahead of illicit ephedrine purchasers while ignoring normal, legal purchases of these over-the-counter cold remedies. The method described herein is an analytic program that automates ephedrine purchase log analysis based on law enforcement experience and intelligence analysis experience. Without human assistance, the invention, a web-viewed service delivered either over local area networks or the interne, pinpoints and extracts the most suspicious names from the data logs for further investigation by the local police department. The automated invention instantaneously delivers a list of likely illegal ephedrine purchasers, sorted by level of suspicion to assist law enforcement.