We're building the first end-to-end asset recovery solution
How much does illicit activity generate each year?
And of those proceeds, what proportion is seized and then confiscated/forfeited?
And of that figure, how much is reinvested in law enforcement and returned to victims and broader society?
While society at large no doubt agrees that crime should not pay, the sad reality is that despite remarkable efforts and individual success stories, we have failed as a global community to ensure that crime does not pay. Two reports are often cited to substantiate this claim:
- At the EU level, a 2016 Europol report on the state of criminal asset recovery concluded that, between 2010 and 2014, only 2.2% of criminal proceeds (€2.4bn/yr) were seized and frozen, and an even smaller fraction of proceeds, 1.1% of the total (€1.2bn/yr), were confiscated/forfeited; and
- Globally, an earlier 2011 study from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that, based on all available estimates, less than 1% of all laundered criminal proceeds were seized (with this 1% figure extrapolated from an even lower figure of 0.2%, or $3.1bn seized by 38 countries in 2010).
The scale of the asset recovery problem is just as hard to quantify today as it was then. Even more concerning is that these statistics pre-date the broader adoption of virtual assets, further increasing the complexity of investigations and compounding the scale of the problem.
Despite individual success stories, we see society's inability to recover assets from criminals as a failure, further compounding the suffering caused by crime worldwide.
We have seen firsthand the devastation caused by criminal activity and the positive impact reinvesting confiscated criminal proceeds can have on our communities.
Effective asset recovery can:
- Restore trust between governments and their citizens
- Disrupt criminal enterprises before they cause more harm
- Deter young individuals from choosing a life of crime
- Improve outcomes for victims
- Alleviate the burden placed on our social services
The asset recovery process includes several phases (with each phase underpinned by legal frameworks):
- tracing and identification
- freezing and seizure
- management to preserve value
- confiscation/forfeiture
- disposal, including the reuse of assets for public or social purposes.
While tracing and investigative techniques have evolved to include modern forensics and advanced analytics, seizing and managing an asset through to disposal is often still carried out with a clipboard onsite and a spreadsheet back in the office.
We can’t manage what we haven’t seized, and we can’t manage what we can’t measure. It’s time for modern solutions to replace the analogue, disparate, and fractured processes of seizing and managing assets.
Asset Reality is built for and by practitioners.
Leveraging hundreds of years of combined experience, we have identified, seized, managed, and returned billions in assets to victims and governments worldwide.
Our advantage lies in our deep understanding of how hard it is to securely seize and efficiently manage an asset through to confiscation/forfeiture.
We have worked for and recovered assets for agencies and organisations, both large and small. We know the constraints they operate within and how much of a force for good they already are.
We know that the only way to solve this problem is by building an end-to-end asset recovery solution that covers all assets (virtual and physical), no matter how low-value, uneconomical or complex it is for us to support them.
