ICC FraudNet has published a new Global Annual Report to highlight international developments and perspectives in fraud, financial crime and asset recovery.
Launching the new Report, Co- Executive Directors Michele Caratsch and Babajide Ogundipe said:
We commend this cutting edge report to all those working in this field and thank all our contributors for their excellent and insightful articles
Fraud and financial crime are among the greatest inhibitors to the stability and prosperity of organisations, institutions and economies around the world, the report says.
However construed, these are everdeveloping, transnational threats to which meaningful and innovative thinking is required in response.
While an ethos of “shared values, shared approaches” underpins the global antieconomic crime framework, particularly vis-à-vis money laundering and financial regulation, a onesize-fits-all approach often omits important contextual challenges across different jurisdictions
In recent years, financial crime has been an increasingly regular subject in the news media. It has been seen in successive breaches of confidential data from law firms in the offshore world and from enforcement authorities and regulators. Cases are increasingly high-profile involving some of the world’s most well-known institutions. In terms of enforcement efforts, new civil and criminal tools are rapidly being designed and deployed beyond traditional recovery mechanisms or use of the criminal justice system.
While the mechanisms of case disposal, recovery or restitution have advanced, so too have the abilities of criminals to use innovative methods to perpetrate misconduct and conceal their illicit gains. These are impacting on insolvency and bankruptcy proceedings, and increasing the complexity of asset structuring and transaction chains.
As the Covid-19 pandemic has acutely demonstrated, cyber-fraud and related misconduct is increasing. So too are the abilities to utilise under-regulated crypto-assets while systems of law around the world make their mind up about the nature of such ‘property’ and its regulation.
Furthermore, bad actors are using advancing technologies to perpetrate wrongdoing, and conceal or transact assets in non-traditional ways. Of course, the other side of this is that financial technologies are assisting practitioners andinvestigators exponentially with recovery efforts, as well as transnational enforcement operations, information sharing, cooperation and mutual assistance.
Just as we are experiencing new and innovate threats, practitioners and the professions are faced with increasing regulatory and legislative obligations. Further, international financial and business centres, particularly ‘offshore’ markets, appear subject to growing, and perhaps disproportionate, pressure to change their models and comply with standards which are not yet global norms
the report concludes.
EXPLORE MORE IN THE ICC FRAUDNET REPORT
