Sofia Gathers Experts in Money Laundering Combat
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Politics: 20 September 2004, Monday. Sofia hosts an international conference with the participation of representatives of the financial intelligence services of fifteen countries.
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Business & money: International group will track $1trillion of illicit funds.
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International police agency Interpol is helping coordinate the investigation into the poisoning death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, with a trail now running through Germany, Russia and Britain.
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Politics: 30 December 2004, Thursday. Sofia police have busted a crime gang of three men that blackmailed the mineral water bottling company Gorna Banya over the last year.
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Frontline internet-crime fighters from security companies, law enforcement agencies, banks and e-commerce sites huddle at a secretive conference to confer on new tactics to fight cybercrime. Participants field lots of strategies, but no one can quite agree on what do.
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BUCHAREST, Jul 20 (IPS) - A recent shooting in Bulgarian capital Sofia  involving Serbian Zemun clan members has brought into focus the  seriousness of Bulgaria's problems with organised crime.
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(InfoWorld) - Fraud investigators are struggling to cope with vast quantities of data sent to them by financial institutions, meaning some crimes may go uninvestigated or even unnoticed, experts said on Wednesday. The issue is prompting banks and other financial institutions to ask law enforcement and regulators to share with them more of the data they have aboutÂ suspicious transactions, in order to better combat fraud. Banks and transfer agencies are required by regulators in the U.S. and the U.K. to file reports when they detect a potentially illegal transaction, said Olga Maitland, head of the International Association of Money Transfer Networks, at the Fraud World 2007 conference in London. Up to 300,000 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are filed per month in the U.S., and up to 200,000 a year in the U.K., but most of those reports "disappear into a black hole" because law enforcement agencies don't have the resources to investigate each one, she said. If another financial institution is mentioned in a report, it may not even know about the suspicious activity if the report is filed by a different institution. "If there is indeed a crime taking place, then that is carrying on undetected," Maitland said. Colin Woodcock, head of the fraud section for the U.K.'s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), said the SARs program has resulted in "huge amounts of information ... which it was difficult to do anything with." "Let's not forget they are suspicious activity reports," Woodcock said during a panel discussion. "Now, if the police or anybody really were expected to act on everything that is suspicious, we would be bogged down in the first five seconds of operation." The quantity of reports has also created a need for greater computing power, he said. The U.K. has made some progress, according to Woodcock, and opened up access to the SARs database to other police forces such as HM Revenue and Customs, the U.K.'s tax authority, which can use it for their own investigations, he said. But sharing the SARs data with financial institutions raises huge concerns around confidentiality and privacy, Woodcock said. It could mean the disclosure of "very embarrassing" information about banks, he said. SARs were "given to us by industry to make the best use law enforcement can make of it, not to go and share it with everybody and say 'Look at what NatWest just told us," he said. "There are huge problems there." (NatWest is a major U.K. bank.) SOCA has started issuing alerts about problem trends, Woodcock said, but Maitland countered that the information is not in-depth. Money transfer networks have blossomed into a trillian-dollar industry. If SOCA can share its information more, by being "less restrictive, less confidential," it would lead to a greater reduction in fraud, Maitland said.
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UK, US, Swiss, Europeans and Canadians take unprecedented action to ease credit crisis
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Following a paper trail across two continents, U.S. and British fraud investigators have moved to subpoena accounts in Miami and San Antonio in their search for at least $240 million allegedly swindled from ...
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The role soil plays in solving global crime is due to be discussed by international forensic experts in Edinburgh.
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A special panel investigating Bulgaria's communist-era police files said Tuesday that the country's current president and 19 lawmakers who once collaborated with the secret service.
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In the battle to bust Eastern European carding syndicates, the biggest obstacles are sometimes the foreign law enforcement agents protecting them. By Kim Zetter.
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International police force Interpol is helping coordinate the investigation into the poisoning of Russian former spy Alexander Litvinenko that now involves forces in Germany, Russia and Britain.
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KPMG suggests 500 billion to one trillion dollars in laundered worldwide annually by drug deals, arms traffickers and other criminals.
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Members of organised crime are joining financial firms to commit fraud, a new report by the industry watchdog reveals.
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Interpol is urged to set up a database of those convicted abroad to stop them working with vulnerable people.
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Hundreds of people, including several who are household names, are under investigation on suspicion that they evaded taxes by steering money to Liechtenstein.