Anyone up in arms about government spending ought to get a kick out of this: Manhattan’s Major Economic Crime Bureau is getting a new department devoted to tracking the digital flow of illicit money through the city, but it won’t cost taxpayers a dime. Instead, the unit will be funded with but a fraction of the $3 billion forked over by six major banks in settlements for cybercrimes of their own.
According to Bloomberg, “settlements have been reached with large foreign banks including HSBC Holdings Plc and Standard Chartered Plc over disguised wire transfers with governments subject to U.S. trade sanctions.” Such violations will be among the sort investigated by the new unit.
“Due to money received in the sanctions investigations, we can invest in public-safety efforts in New York City that relate to cybercrime and technology,” District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said in a cybercrime symposium at New York’s Federal Reserve Bank. He remarked that international money movement is a common factor in a diverse range of illegal activities, from intellectual property theft and identity theft to human trafficking, and therefore a necessary point of focus for law enforcement, which is struggling to keep pace with Web technology.
Most of all, however, Vance is interested in updating the legal approach to the kind of white-collar crime that bankrolled the new unit. In September he issued “sweeping recommendations for modernizing antiquated fraud and corruption laws,” which have “not undergone a comprehensive revision since 1965” or been substantially updated since 1986.
“State laws have simply not kept pace with technological and other advancements, greatly impeding the ability of local prosecutors to combat these crimes,” he said.
H/T Bloomberg | Photo by Hanneorla Hanneorla/Flickr
