Prosecutors

This course provides students with the fundamental knowledge and skills necessary to perform a limited digital forensic examination, validate hardware and software tools, and effectively use digital forensic suites and specialized tools. The course begins with a detailed study of the digital forensic examination process, including documentation, case management, evidence handling, validation, and virtualization. Students learn to use todays leading commercial and open source digital forensic suites: Magnet Axiom, X-ways Forensic, and Autopsy. Instruction on each suite will include an interface overview, configuration, hashing, file signature analysis, keyword searching, data carving, bookmarking, and report creation.

*Digital forensic process. Evidence review; requests for examination; case management.
*Validation. Creation of validation images; validation testing.
*Effective tool usage. Tool interface; hashing; file signature analysis; data carving; searching; metadata; bookmarking.
*Reporting. General report structure; report templates; using tool-generated reports.

This course promotes a multi-agency approach to the problem of financial exploitation of senior citizens. Topics include working with senior victims, examining documents like bank records and power of attorney, and resources for investigation and community awareness. Detailed examination of a case study from initial complaint to prosecution reinforces and illustrates the course content. With a dual focus on financial abuse by trusted persons and common scams aimed at seniors, the course introduces senior-specific investigative skills while facilitating networking and cooperation that can extend out of the classroom and into real cases.

This three-day course is dedicated to studying the fundamentals of quantitative and qualitative data analysis and how to formulate arguments in support of criminal investigations and intelligence. Students will learn about data management techniques and a disciplined process to clean and standardize data in preparation for analysis. The course will also explore several common investigative objectives, including the discovery of associations between people and entities, the correlation between unlawful activity and suspects, behavioral affinities, and predictions. The course will introduce the Enterprise Theory of Crime and how to use network analysis to formulate conclusions about the structure of criminal organizations, their players and roles, the identification of facilitators, charting of financial arrangements, and connections to unlawful activity. The course enables the production of valuable, accurate, and efficient logical inferences produced by collecting data related to unlawful activity.

An effective financial investigation can disrupt terrorism organizations and interrupt, deter, or even stop operational terrorism activities before they can begin. In this three-day course, students develop an understanding of how financial systems are used to support terrorism activities and transnational criminal organizations. Students will work with tools and methods to investigate the manipulation of financial, communication, and business systems used for illicit purposes. Students will learn how to work with suspicious activity reports, crucial financial records such as Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) messaging, and records used in banking and money services businesses. They will also learn how to gather information and evidence on other means of value transfer methods associated with money laundering, the black-market peso and forms of trade-based money laundering, hawala, and other alternate remittance systems, and virtual assets (cryptocurrency).