Our client is a law enforcement agency, with operational priorities including investigating complex crime, and criminal assets confiscation, while exploiting advanced technology to support Australia’s national interests.
Targeting the criminal economy and confiscating criminal assets is crucial to disrupting and deterring organised criminal activity and delivering maximum impact.
Criminal Assets Hidden Behind Complex Legal Company Structures
In order to confiscate assets effectively, the taskforce must first identify assets that can be seized and then conduct a legal process for the confiscation.
Increasingly, organised crime organisations are utilising legal company structures to mask the ownership of their assets.
These company structures can also include complex beneficial ownership structures to further mask ownership of assets. In addition to this, there are dozens of data sources that contain both the beneficial ownership structures and the various asset types including real estate data, shareholdings, motor vehicles and much more.
The combination of the utilisation of complex legal company structures as well as the number of asset data sets required means that identifying assets that can be seized is a manual, time consuming task.
The identification of assets for one case alone was in some cases taking a skilled team over a month to complete.
This elapsed time hampered taskforce’s ability to quickly and effectively complete their mission of seizing assets.
Unified View of Company Structures and Asset Data
GraphAware Hume with Neo4j is perfectly suited to storing and analysing complex company ownership chains.
Rather than analysing company ownerships manually, graphs are able to represent the network of company ownerships almost instantaneously. In addition, Hume is perfectly suited to creating a single view of intelligence across many data sets.
The combination of these two technologies means that Agency analysts can instantly uncover complex company structures, and the assets that are attached to them in one single tool.
The Agency team utilised GraphAware Hume platform to load the required company structure data and asset data sets to the graph.
Then, using Hume actions, the team developed queries that would allow analysts to select an entity of interest and query the database for the company structures they were associated with.
Finally, with the company structures returned to the canvas, the team developed Hume actions that presented assets that were attached to the companies on the canvas.
Identifying Confiscatable Assets in 1 Hour Instead of 4 Weeks
Utilising the GraphAware Hume platform, the Agency team were able to build a cutting edge solution for the financial crime investigation taskforce.
Analysts are now able to instantly identify company ownerships and the assets attached to them. One of the core functions of the Agency, the identification of potential assets was now a process that took 1 hour, instead of up to 4 weeks.
This vast improvement in the speed to identify and analyse assets meant that financial crime investigation taskforce were able to identify significantly more assets, and have a better understanding of the complex company structures that are being utilised by organised criminals.
Graphs have been a game changer for our agency and its mission.
— Coordinator Data Analytics