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.
The problem: criminal assets hidden behind complex legal company structures
To confiscate assets effectively, the task force must first identify assets that can be seized and then conduct a legal process for confiscation.
Increasingly, organised crime organisations use complex company and beneficial ownership structures to mask the ownership of their assets. The Agency relies on dozens of data sources to understand those structures and assets, including real estate data, shareholding information, vehicle registries, and many more.
The combined complexity of the company structures, complex asset ownership, and multiple data sets made identifying assets for seizure a highly manual and time-consuming task. A single case could take a skilled team over a month to complete, severely hampering the task force’s ability to meet its mission.
The solution: a unified view of company structures and asset data
GraphAware Hume, powered by Neo4j, is ideal for storing and analysing intricate company ownership chains. While manual analysis is often labour-intensive, graphs represent these networks almost instantaneously.
Furthermore, GraphAware Hume excels at consolidating multiple datasets into a single, unified view of intelligence.
By combining these technologies, Agency analysts can immediately uncover complex corporate structures and their associated assets within a single tool. To achieve this, the Agency used the GraphAware Hume platform to ingest key datasets, including corporate records and asset information, into the graph.
Using Hume actions, the team then developed intuitive queries. These allow analysts to select a specific entity and immediately visualise the surrounding company structures.
Once these structures are displayed on the canvas, additional actions reveal the specific assets linked to those companies, providing a comprehensive operational picture.
The results: identifying confiscatable assets in an hour instead of 4 weeks
Thanks to the GraphAware Hume platform, the Agency team built a cutting-edge solution for the financial crime investigation task force.
Analysts can now instantly identify company owners and the assets attached to them. One of the core functions of the Agency, the identification of potential assets, now takes 1 hour, instead of 4 weeks.
This vast improvement means financial crime investigation task forces have more time 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