The Dark Night Online | A love letter to Indian Law Enforcement - Lessons from 100 DAYS INTO AN INDIA JURISDICTION CRYPTO CRIME - I'm working several cases out of INDIA for victims of TRADING PLATFORM and FAKE EXCHANGE Crypto Crime and Fraud. One of the cases has stumbled into interdepartmental confusion.
PEOPLE. PROCESS. PROSECUTION.
One of the early things that I learned about State and Federal Police and the specialist units that combat online fraud, is the sheer interdepartmental chaos that often occurs from the very normal organisational circumstances of People and the Process of Prosecution.
LAW ENFORCEMENT: P.S. I LOVE YOU!
As I say this, understand that as a person who is trained to simplify systems processes, develop procedures, and simplify interoperability, I am on the side of law enforcement and want to help.
OBJECTIVE INSIGHT
Sometimes it helps to see things objectively from the outside-in, to understand where the failures in processes are occurring, so that you can improve them. We all want the same thing, HELP THE VICTIM and CATCH THE CRIMINAL, within the applicable law.
MUTUAL GOAL: SIMPLIFY COMPLEXITY
Concisely, Crypto Criminals can be agile and are expert at using their victims as mule accounts, using diversionary tactics to create forensic complexity.
WHO IS THE PERP?
Police often look at the data and see all the accounts as a network of criminals. This is often true. We are very confronting organised crime networks.
THE MULE TRADER
The dark emerging trend is for single organised criminal to use their victims as their money laundering network to distract investigators from the kingpin.
THE CIVILIAN AGENCY
It becomes my job from a paralegal investigative point of view, to assemble a forensic blockchain analysis to contribute to the chain evidence. But that's not enough as a basis to prosecute. We have quantitative, numerical, metric evidence and we have qualitative, factual, circumstantial evidence. These combine to clarify who to prosecute, by showing who, what, when, where and how, and what kind of a crime occurred, while also validating the ownership of the asset. That should make the law enforcement job much easier, so long as it complies with and meets legal prosecution standards.
MORE TIME FOR DIVERSION
The longer a case goes on, the more likely a case is to get far more complex, due to the sheer volume of diversions and deflections. From the originating transaction, often to dozens of hundreds of laundering transactions.
SUPER SUBPOENA SILVER BULLET
Expecting a single super subpoena or warrant to gain access to PII information from all VASPs is a delusion but shouldn't be. A prosecutor should be able to gain a one-size-fits all warrant to present to dozens of regulated exchanges, through an internal Interpol system that any law enforcement agency can log into. Criminals love the complexity and love how difficult it is for law enforcement. They love how poorly trained state police are in Interpol orders. And that paperwork is still used.
Glyn MacLean is founder of TDNO and has investigated Crypto Crime
since May 2016. @glynmaclean