Case study
The right tool for the job: how software helped the Calgary Police Service combat money laundering
The Calgary Police Service recover more than $8 million of assets in one investigation alone.
With money laundering increasing in scale and complexity, The Calgary Police Service needed the best and most reliable tools to enable them to keep on top of the workload and to set them up for success and assist in investigations.
The challenge
The solution
By using Financial Investigation Toolkit for every disclosure from financial institutions obtained through judicial authorizations, the team were able to automate and speed up the processing of paper and digital financial data into an Excel format from which they could extract evidence.
Additionally, the comprehensive range of tools, reports and functions enabled a full understanding of financial accounts, uncovering trends, patterns and relationships within financial data at speed.
The team found the following features to be most effective in their work:
Pattern manager
Pattern Manager automates the identification of patterns related to financial crime and suspicious activities. It allows users to define, store, and run complex behavioral or transactional patterns across large financial data sets.
Merge accounts
This functionality allows users to combine multiple accounts believed to belong to the same individual or entity into a single, unified view.
Transaction matcher
Configurable rules automate the identification of linked financial transactions across different accounts or datasets. It plays a critical role in uncovering suspicious financial patterns and tracing illicit money flows.
The results
Since adopting Financial Investigation Toolkit, the Calgary Police Service have used the software to assist in several investigations. The software has proven to be a beneficial tool in saving time and allowing investigators to complete investigations in a more timely manner.
In some instances, analysis that took one to two weeks to complete, now takes less than a minute.
To give a specific example, in recent years the CPS Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture Team launched an operation targeting an online steroid manufacturing and trafficking business run by several suspects. Steroids and other illegal substances were trafficked across Canada. Proceeds from the sale of drugs were laundered through numerous traditional financial accounts, securities investments, real estate transactions and through different cryptocurrencies.
Geoff McLaughlin, Detective, Calgary Police said:
“Due to the increasing complexity of financial crimes, our investigations related to organized crime pose the biggest challenge of getting the right balance of resources – people and technology – so we can conduct the best possible investigation. By using Altia Financial Investigation Toolkit, we’ve been able to significantly reduce manual data entry, and conduct analysis rapidly with confidence, knowing it meets evidential standards. Altia Financial Investigation Toolkit is considered to be a trustworthy and invaluable tool to support complex investigations in a rapidly changing landscape.”
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