Nigel's Eyes

20230418 Nigel's Newsletter

The past couple of weeks has seen some significant issues in financial crime but, sadly, many practitioners are far too busy to see their implications on their own. We’re here to help.

Today, at World Money Laundering Report we have the story of the banker in Singapore who has admitted that he and other senior managers didn’t know what to do when they knew there was a problem, but didn’t understand how the bank was involved.

In the past week, we’ve seen the UK put out its proposals for a ″failure to prevent″ offence for fraud. It’s generated virtual miles of print comment almost all from consultants and lawyers who stand to make a fortune from it. The Financial Crime Forum’s ″failure to prevent″ series next week includes Fraud, Bribery, Money Laundering and Breaching Sanctions and presents a balanced view. Internal auditors, who will be in the firing line for assessing compliance with new policies and procedures are especially recommended to attend.

The serious worlds of counterfeiting and trafficking, both with a range of subject areas, also have Fora as do CryptoCrime and Industrial Espionage / Computer security. For example, do you know that while a hacker can suck 1TB of data down a fibre-optic cable in a couple of minutes, an old-fashioned data thief would need a pile of 3.5 inch floppy disks as tall as a twenty storey building to carry the same out of a building. So when a worker at the US Department of Defence decided to photocopy individual pieces of paper and carry them out in his pocket, the range of industrial espionage practices is almost incomprehensibly wide.

My blog has a couple of serious pieces: one is very personal – about why I am about to cease my pride and joy: being a solicitor, albeit one that retired from practice almost two decades ago. The second is an examination of the threat of cyberwar and why the Fourth Geneva Convention is now inadequate.

Back at World Money Laundering Report, Peter Coleman’s ″so you think you know fraud″ sits alongside an analysis of how UK courts can view the admissibility of evidence obtained by foreign law enforcement agencies in the latest case arising from the Encrochat investigations, there’s stuff about data breaches, fake banks and, especially worrying, the threat of radicalism in India and how it is overspilling internationally.

At The Financial Crime Forum, we’re now booking up until the end of June – and we’ve outlined our programme until the end of September. We’re delivering on our mission to take the best speakers and advanced thinking to places that would ordinarily never hear from them. We don’t have speakers that you’ll see on several platforms this year and our speakers aren’t doing PR and trying to sell to you. We make a small charge for a Forum that lasts, usually, five hours because we rarely have sponsorship (unlike all those free ″webinars″ you see).

Our face to face training for law enforcement, judges, legislators, regulators and prosecutors, on Understanding Suspicion in Financial Crime has been updated to include ″Artificial Suspicion: understanding the abilities and limitations of algorithmic analysis and the resulting decisions.″ Almost every case we read tells us that there a fundamental lack of understanding with the leading cases trying to reconcile limited information, mostly taken from cases that have nothing to do with financial crime. My own research into this is by far the most comprehensive and advanced available.

This course is also available online for the financial and commercial sectors.

Almost finally: as if people pretending to be The Financial Crime Forum isn’t badenough, we came across an e-learning training provider advertising on LinkedIn which had copied, almost word for word, material I published in 1998 and 2001. So, be cautious, please. Make sure you are getting the original, not a pastiche.

And finally, because the world never stays still, later today World Money Laundering Report will look at the SEC’s civil suit against another crypto-trading platform with a wish that it would stop saying it’s ″charged″ when the action is not under the criminal law.

Thanks for reading.

Regards

Nigel Morris-Cotterill
www.countermoneylaundering.com

LINKS

The Financial Crime Forum:
www.financialcrimeforum.com

World Money Laundering Report: www.worldmoneylaunderingreport.com

Face to Face Training on suspicion: https://financialcrimeriskandcompliance.com/elan/web/face_to_face_under…

e-learning for the financial and commercial sectors including ″Understanding Suspicion″ : https://learning.financialcrimeriskandcompliancetraining.com

My blog:
https://www.countermoneylaundering.com