By a Biometrica staffer London in the late 17th and 18th centuries was a rather challenging place to live in, going by one specific measure: the presence of gangs. Certain parts of the city had gained such notoriety as hotbeds of crime...
By a Biometrica staffer This midterm election season, along with the state of the economy, the country's crime rate has been under the scanner. Forty percent of U.S. registered voters said crime is an extremely important issue when it comes to their...
By a Biometrica staffer Is Organized Retail Crime (ORC) really a cause for concern? Isn't it a victimless crime, as many perceive? The answer to the first question is an emphatic yes, while the answer to the second is an equally clear...
By a Biometrica staffer Late last November, about 80 people barged into a Nordstrom department store in the East Bay Area city of Walnut Creek in California, stealing merchandise until police arrived and arrested three of them. That was but one of...
By a Biometrica staffer An overwhelming majority (over 90%) of all money mule transactions identified through the European Money Mule Actions are linked to cybercrime, the Europol says. What does that mean? It means a large number of law-abiding citizens in the...
By a Biometrica staffer A two-day global online virtual assets conference — co-organized by INTERPOL, Europol, and the Basel Institute on Governance — concluded with a call to action on better protecting the world’s financial systems by increasing multi-sector cooperation to strengthen...
By Aara Ramesh In an earlier story in this series on sports betting, we wrote about how just as there have been wagers (legal or otherwise) placed on sporting outcomes as long as there have been sports, match-fixing has existed just as...
By a Biometrica staffer Cultural property crime continued unabated throughout the global Covid-19 pandemic, and in some cases even surged to new heights, according to INTERPOL’s 2020 Assessing Crimes Against Cultural Property survey findings. In the Americas, the number of offences reported...
By a Biometrica staffer The Global Organized Crime Index paints a "worrying picture of the reach, scale and impact of organized crime in 2020." The data driven analytics tool evaluated 193 United Nations member states. The 2020 report, the first published by Global Initiative,...
By a Biometrica staffer Evidence in the alleged murder of a federal security officer in Oakland was destroyed by four Northern California members affiliated with the far right boogaloo movement, authorities said on Sep. 20. Jessie Rush, Robert Blancas, Simon Ybarra and...
By a Biometrica staffer In late 2020, much before anyone ever imagined that a deadlier variant of the Covid-19 virus would sweep across the world and wreak renewed havoc on healthcare and governance systems, organizations like the United Nations Office on Drugs...
By a Biometrica staffer The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has bumped up to $5 million the reward for information that might lead to the apprehension of Jian Zhang, a man believed to be a key figure in illegal fentanyl trafficking in...
By Aara Ramesh On Wednesday, Aug. 11, a federal jury of seven men and five women was impanelled in New York in the trial of disgraced R&B superstar Robert Kelly (known professionally as R. Kelly) on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. This...
By Aara Ramesh Next month marks 20 years since the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) conducted a series of raids and arrested eight individuals for a racketeering plot in which they defrauded McDonald’s Corp of $24 million dollars over a 12-year period. ...
By Aara Ramesh In what is being called the “largest and most sophisticated” operation ever against encrypted criminal activities, Europol, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and law enforcement agencies in 16 countries across the world have managed to take down hundreds...
By Aara Ramesh The fallout of last week’s ransomware cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline continues. On Wednesday, May 12, the Biden–Harris administration announced that it was implementing an all-of-government plan to combat fuel shortages resulting from the attack, with the president also issuing...
By a Biometrica staffer Just last month, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said in a blog that over the last five years, ransomware has evolved from being "a threat to individual computers to posing a serious danger to corporate networks." Or, to put it...
By a Biometrica staffer Moises Alexis Reyes-Canales of Maryland pled guilty on May 6 to charges of conspiracy to participate in a racketeering enterprise that involved the murder of one person and the attempted murder of two others in Annapolis. Reyes-Canales, 23, aka...
By a Biometrica staffer If you recall, just over a week ago, we had written a piece on how organized crime groups (OCGs) managed to carve out a $2.6 billion cut in Italy’s strong tourism sector, based on an article by the Organized...
By Anand Vasu In their 2021 Serious and Organized Crime Threat Assessment, or SOCTA, Europol has identified the most serious threats posed by criminal organizations to individuals and businesses. The annual report, put together by Europol after analyzing data from law enforcement...
By a Biometrica staffer Authorities in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands have enabled major interventions to block the use of encrypted communications by large-scale organized crime groups. Judicial and law enforcement authorities from these countries worked closely with each other, supported by...
By a Biometrica staffer Interpol issued a global alert to law enforcement across its 194 member countries warning them to gear up for organized crime networks targeting covid-19 vaccines. The group’s Orange Notice warned the international community to prepare for possible infiltration...