Shenaz Muzaffer, General Counsel of the International Association of Prosecutors, spoke at the 8th Global Conference on Criminal Finances and Cryptocurrencies in a panel on “practical challenges in the investigation and prosecution of crypto-related financial crimes.” The two-day conference was co-organised by Europol and the Basel Institute on Governance and hosted by UNODC.

Latin America has seen various legislative efforts in the fight against rampant economic and organised crime and in the endeavour to recover illicit assets relating to these crimes. Among theses efforts is a wide variety of non-conviction based (NCB) forfeiture regimes and applicable standards.

NCB forfeiture allows for the recovery of illicit assets autonomously, i.e. outside of criminal proceedings, through an independent judicial process that applies civil rules and is directed against the asset itself (in rem).

Is financial crime really a security threat, as an increasing number of countries and experts now say? If so, in what sense? And what implications might that have for our efforts to fight it?

The issues around framing financial crime as a threat to national and international security were a key topic on the agenda of the first international Summit of the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime (GCFFC) in Stockholm, Sweden, on 10–11 September 2024.

Investing in preventing and combating the misuse of the crypto ecosystem for financial crime is vital to safeguard both national and international security.

This was a resounding message arising from the 8th Global Conference on Criminal Finances and Cryptocurrencies, which concluded on 12 September 2024 after two days of intense discussions and updates from leading voices in the field.

Leading voices in the field of countering economic crime came together at the 2024 Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime to discuss this year’s theme: “suspect assets”.

The very first session of the Symposium sought to answer a key question from the outset: Why attack assets in the first place?

At a joint webinar with the International Academy of Financial Crime Litigators, leading legal experts from around the world explored the debates around the role of victims in negotiated settlements for economic crimes.

Financial data is the foundation of any investigation into corruption and related financial crimes – but a lot of data is not available in a format that is easy to collect and analyse.

Investigators often waste many hours combining data from different formats, manually re-typing financial data contained in images or poor scans, or copy-pasting information from the internet. Not only is this inefficient and frustrating: it may lead to errors that will throw the investigation or prosecution off course.