The National Crime Agency (NCA) launched a project largest yet in the world against economic crimes. Since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, Britain has spent over around 350 billion pounds ($452 billion) every year since 2022 to counter the economic crimes that might be exploiting the financial system. The war put the kleptocrats and criminals used the country as a haven to launder and use the black money in the country in the spotlight.
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NatWest and Lloyds are among seven banks to share customer data with the National Crime Agency (NCA). Adrian Searle, director of the NCA’s National Economic Crime Centre said
“At the moment, criminals can exploit the banking system to move money at pace across international borders in ways that law enforcement has struggled to prevent. This joint working is a truly innovative approach to try and prevent this criminality. It is the first time this has been tried on such a scale anywhere in the world.
We are bringing together targeted bank transaction data with the crime related data sets the NCA can access. This should enable our respective analytical teams to detect and disrupt criminality, and reduce the risk banks are managing, that may otherwise have been unknown. It could also pave the way for the future ambition to use real time data insight to prevent economic and associated crimes.”
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A Concern of Privacy Breach
In such a large operation where people’s private information is at stake raises a lot of concerns among common people about their right to privacy, addressing which a senior banking executive involved in the trial said “We are deeply conscious of the issues around data privacy. It’s also clear that our terms and conditions as banks enable us to share the information without notification to the customer because this is all ultimately to do with fulfilling our legal obligations to help detect crime and prevent financial harm,”
In this program, NCA has made a team of 20 officers consisting of data scientists and analysts who will assist bank staff in tracking potential criminal patterns that can be suspected of being an offender. All the legitimate customers will be left alone. These strict measures are taken in order to prevent the fall of European data protection and privacy laws
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