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- Trend snippet: Economic and financial crime are becoming less visible to law enforcement authorities
Trends in Security Information
The HSD Trendmonitor is designed to provide access to relevant content on various subjects in the safety and security domain, to identify relevant developments and to connect knowledge and organisations. The safety and security domain encompasses a vast number of subjects. Four relevant taxonomies (type of threat or opportunity, victim, source of threat and domain of application) have been constructed in order to visualize all of these subjects. The taxonomies and related category descriptions have been carefully composed according to other taxonomies, European and international standards and our own expertise.
In order to identify safety and security related trends, relevant reports and HSD news articles are continuously scanned, analysed and classified by hand according to the four taxonomies. This results in a wide array of observations, which we call ‘Trend Snippets’. Multiple Trend Snippets combined can provide insights into safety and security trends. The size of the circles shows the relative weight of the topic, the filters can be used to further select the most relevant content for you. If you have an addition, question or remark, drop us a line at info@securitydelta.nl.
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Economic and financial crime are becoming less visible to law enforcement authorities
Despite all measures taken to combat economic and financial crimes, opportunities for these types of crimes have increased as the market for legal financial services has diversified and technology continues to change the way and speed of how financial transactions occur.
Economic and financial crime currently offers a relatively low risk of discovery and prosecution with potentially very high profits. This dynamic makes these criminal activities very attractive to organised crime. The complexity of these crimes and the sophisticated expertise necessary to carry them out have always made them difficult to detect and investigate. However, technical innovation and the digitalisation of financial transactions have presented additional challenges for law enforcement authorities. Many of these crimes are now even less visible than before and more challenging to investigate.
Fraud schemes too often remain undetected. Successful law enforcement actions against these complex schemes require close international cooperation across several jurisdictions, often involving noncooperative offshore tax havens, as criminals operate without regard for international borders. Organised crime groups (OCGs) operating internationally benefit from differences in national legislation. Individual and organisational vulnerabilities such as insufficient awareness on the part of victims and low risk perception by criminals are enabling factors for most types of fraud.
There is increased awareness that certain acts within the financial sector that were once considered to be merely poor business practice may in fact have been criminal. Widespread reckless investment, misrepresentation of financial statements and conspiring to manipulate inter-bank interest rates fall within the definition of serious and organised crime. The huge losses associated with high-level financial fraud undermine social security systems and destabilise economies.