Raising the bar or sinking the ship?
Michael Shearer
Chief Solution Officer - HAWK:AI | Former Managing Director @ HSBC | Financial Crime Risk Management
Apologies, it's been a while since my last post.
As an intelligence officer the protection of sources and methods is a matter of the utmost importance; lives depend upon keeping the means by which intelligence is gathered a secret. The obvious reason is that were it to be revealed how sensitive information was collected then the subject of interest would undoubtedly alter their behaviour or take direct action to prevent further compromise or, maybe worse, manipulate the information flow to their own ends.
As an anti financial crime practitioner I have always been conscious that the same confidentiality principle may apply. I have looked upon lists of 'red flags' that are disclosed across our community and wondered if their publication, whilst well-intended, could be counterproductive. Clearly there is a risk that seasoned criminals will avoid these known behaviours and adopt new methods to evade detection, thereby denying law enforcement of suspicious activity reporting that would otherwise be triggered by their ongoing use of avowed methods.
However, perhaps there is a crucial difference between financial crime fighting and intelligence gathering. In the world of espionage the goal is often to gain insights into the minds of others, where the compromise and subsequent denial, of such opportunities is wholly detrimental (at least in the eyes of those conducting the intelligence operation).
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In the business of fighting financial crime the reduction in visibility of criminal schemes, and hence the reduced capacity for interdiction, may be balanced against the potential upside of raising the bar, and the hence the cost, for criminals of conducting their operations undetected.
Therein lies the somewhat naive hope that financial crime can be nudged towards being sufficiently difficult to execute undetected that the additional overhead acts as a deterrent, with the result that marginal predicate crimes are no longer sufficiently profitable.
What do you think, have we got the balance right?
(All views are my own)
Founder & CEO SimpleAccounts.io at Data Innovation Technologies | Partner & Director of Strategic Planning & Relations at HiveWorx
8 个月Michael, Great insights! ?? Thanks for sharing!
Technology & Financial Crimes Executive
8 个月Michael Shearer, thanks for asking the question so publicly. I have been asking everyone in our space, for as long as I can remember "why do we continue to educate our enemies?". Governments publish rules and guidelines, along with detailed consent orders and DPA's, experts in our space share war stories while vendors of technology and data produce volumes of words and images sharing how they're better and different. I know that I must have contributed to this pool of useful information, even whilst asking the question above. I've thought in the past about getting the balance right, between education for understanding by practitioners and education of consequences for criminals. What's worrying now, is that, with generative AI exploding, there are techniques (I'll not cover in this context) enabling all that data to come together, quickly, easily and at surprisingly low cost, rapidly expediting the criminal's knowledge and ability to act. It's also true that "the good" have many things to focus on, whilst "the bad" only have one thing, so we are always up against it anyway. Keeping our knowledge to ourselves, within a close-knit community would be more advantageous, but at what cost to our rights to access information?