In a panel session entitled ‘Fighting financial crime: Taking a collaborative approach,’ participants discussed how real-time payment systems are helping to tackle fraud.
To this end, an increasing number of countries, including Australia, Japan, and Spain, are using Interpol’s I-GRIP (Global Rapid Intervention of Payments) tool to prevent cross-border financial crime.
The system, launched in 2022, allows countries to stop outgoing cross-border payments when they are a result of criminal activities, allowing the victim to get their money back. This is especially helpful in fraud and blackmail cases when victims are tricked or intimidated into sending money abroad.
These cases are much harder to prevent than hacking, so prevention must be more customer-centred than just cyber security-focused.
Tools like I-GRIP work by reversing the effects of a crime rather than preventing it in the usual ways, which can be more effective. However, this relies on the fraudulent transaction being reported almost immediately, which can be hard to do as people often don’t know they are being scammed.
Once a crime is reported, local law enforcement agents need to act quickly for tools like I-GRIP to be useful – which sometimes doesn’t happen due to a lack of awareness about the tool’s potential. “We are asking our member countries, as a requesting country, to let police in their local offices know about I-GRIP, because unless they know about it, they are not going to use it,” said Sungyong Kang, Criminal Intelligence Officer at Interpol.
In July 2024, I-GRIP helped authorities in Singapore recover a record £32 million from an intercepted scam being sent to Timor Leste. The criminals had impersonated a supplier and tricked the Singapore-based commodities firm into sending the funds abroad. Interpol has used the tool to recover hundreds of millions’ worth of funds since; it is hoping to both reverse the effects of fraud and decrease the incentive for criminals in the long term, decreasing the overall incidence of scams.
Because the way to spot attacks relies on expert manpower, which is often short on hand, some banks have relied on this and other digital solutions to fight back against fraud. Digital twins, for example, can serve as approximations of law enforcement experts to help institutions spot financial fraud.
“While we wait for the big data engines and the big AI engines to decipher and remove complexity, in the interim there’s a need for people and expertise to be more accessible. Essentially, what we’ve done is to create a digital workforce out of your experts that can now work through a million alerts, and be available in a real-time fashion,” said Carl Wocke, CEO of Merlynn Intelligence Technologies, a company that uses AI to create digital twins.
