Prosecutors

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).

This three-day course covers the fundamentals of financial investigations and incorporates some of the more advanced processes that elevate an investigation. During this course, students will learn about investigative processes, practical tools, and sources of information necessary to plan and conduct financial investigations. The course begins with a description of the basic composition of elements within illicit financial networks and how they work to compromise legitimate business and financial sectors. Course material will describe government, regulatory, and investigative actions within the United States, and by international partners to detect and investigate illicit actors and networks. The course also includes considerations for investigation planning and promotion of creative thinking.

This course prepares students to identify various artifacts typically located in property lists and SQLite databases on MacOS-based computers, as well as learn how to perform forensic analysis. Students gain hands-on practical experience writing basic SQL queries and using to analyze operating system artifacts that includes, but is not limited to, user login passwords, FaceTime, messages, mail, contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, photos, Safari, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox.

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.