A wise Professor asked me why I thought there were so few criminal cases of corruption in the UK. My first thought was that, “It’s because there is no Corruption Squad”. I looked into it some more and discovered that it was not quite as simple as that. I had to rope in some experts …
The global anti-money laundering regime is in crisis, not from lack of resources but from lack of understanding. We need to get back to basics, right back to Eve, the first woman (in the Christian tradition) and the first thief and money launderer. Eve was the one who took the Fruit of the Forbidden Tree …
Every year hundreds of thousands of people in the worldwide financial sector generate information about money they suspect to be the proceeds of crime, they do this so that law enforcement can identify and recover it. Every year they assume that courts confiscate at least some of the money. The courts could do this, in …
A decade of funding cuts and now the need to police a public health emergency means an ever-increasing need to do more with less. In the mid-nineties the gap between resources and demand led to innovative solutions like computerisation and intelligence-led policing. We need to innovate again. One way to focus stretched resources would be …
Long before I joined the Metropolitan Police Fraud Squad I has fascinated by the concept of deception. How did apparently clever, even street-wise people get caught out by deceivers? Deception takes many forms, of course, this article is about the one-off deception, the sort that ruins lives, where the loss is the life savings, sometimes …
This post explains the difference between confiscation, forfeiture, restraint, sequestration, seizing, freezing, civil recovery and asset recovery. This is to help you understand what is in the news, whichever country you are in. These terms are all lawful ways to deprive people of the proceeds of crime in litigation against criminals or criminal assets. They …
It is a crime, the crime of handling the proceeds of other crimes. National criminal offence definitions must conform to the United Nations’ Conventions (UNCAC, UNTOC and Narcotics) which all have identical wording to describe money laundering. None of the definitions use the words “money” or “laundering”. Athough the criminal offence is new, the activity …
A Fair Cop 