Dirty assets: the Silver Notice hits organized crime in its pocket

Globally, criminals succeed in keeping around 99 per cent of their illegal gains. Our new Silver Notice initiative aims to change that. It gives us global visibility on billions of dollars in illegal assets and supports their recovery and return to their legal owner. 

The Silver Notice is the newest of INTERPOL’s colour-coded Notices and Diffusions, which enable countries to share alerts and requests for information worldwide. It was launched as a pilot this January with 51 participating countries and by end June over 50 Silver Notices had been published, involving countries from across the world. All requests to publish a Silver Notice or Diffusion are reviewed by our team of operations and legal specialists and, for those that are cleared for publication, our specialist financial crime unit works closely with the jurisdictions involved to trace and identify the assets involved. Ranging from cash or cryptocurrency to real estate, luxury yachts or cars, these assets are the illegal proceeds of criminal activities such as fraud, corruption, drug, arms and human trafficking, and environmental crime.  They are often rapidly moved across borders, making recovery highly complex and dependent on the effective international cooperation that only INTERPOL can provide. “Stripping criminals and their networks of illegal profits is one of the most powerful ways to fight transnational organized crime, especially considering that 99 per cent of criminal assets remain unrecovered,” says Valdecy Urquiza, INTERPOL Secretary General. “By targeting their financial gains, INTERPOL is working to disrupt criminal networks and reduce their harmful impact on communities worldwide.”

Bilateral transatlantic success

The first Silver Notice was requested in January by Italy, where the Guardia di Finanza was seeking information on assets belonging to a senior member of the mafia. Since then, it has also become one of the new tool’s first success stories, with over USD 1.7 million in illegal assets – ranging from cash and real estate to vehicles and even cattle – identified and located in Brazil. Following initial contacts between national-level judicial bodies in Italy and Brazil, the publication of this Silver Notice enabled direct bilateral police-to-police coordination, supported by INTERPOL’s specialist financial crime unit. This in turn led to cooperation with the appropriate Brazilian court at the local level and the successful identification of the illegal assets, with coordination to secure their seizure ongoing. “The Silver Notice initiative gives the law enforcement its first global tool to make this kind of outcome a reality,” says Claudio Marinelli, Operational Coordinator, INTERPOL Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre. “Until its launch, we had zero visibility on the value of the damage created by organized criminals globally, but now the data from the Notices and Diffusions already published gives us a clear picture of billions of dollars in illicit assets, with hundreds of targets identified and hundreds of new leads to investigate.”

Following the money across the globe

As well as providing case coordination to support the countries following those leads, our financial crime experts have also organized workshops to give law enforcement and justice professionals in all regions a better understanding of how to make use of the tool in its pilot phase. Their impact has been clear, with the number of requests for publication multiplied five-fold after the first workshop in the Americas alone. “Participants at the workshops have been very enthusiastic about the potential of the Silver Notice,” says Theos Badege, Director pro tempore, INTERPOL Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre. “They know that money is the thread that runs through almost every form of organized crime and that to dismantle criminal networks, we must follow the money – identify it, trace it, disrupt the financial infrastructure that enables them to launder money across borders and work to return stolen assets to their rightful owner,” he concludes.