The evolution of the cybercrime landscape in the UK has evolved rapidly and in this episode, Andrew Gould (Detective Chief Superintendent & Cybercrime Team Lead, National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) shares deep insights with Jim Lee (Global Head of Capacity Building, Chainalysis) on how the NPCC has built their capacity in handling crypto investigations and how they fostered instrumental public private partnerships.
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Public Key Episode 170: Government Funding & Crypto Crime: UK Law Enforcement’s Game-Changing Approach
The evolution of the cybercrime landscape in the UK has evolved rapidly and in this episode, Andrew Gould (Detective Chief Superintendent & Cybercrime Team Lead, National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) shares deep insights with Jim Lee (Global Head of Capacity Building, Chainalysis) on how the NPCC has built their capacity in handling crypto investigations.
Andrew explains how his cybercrime unit has orchestrated a collaborative national response towards cyber threats and ransomware attacks and the strategic approaches towards building and enhancing investigative capabilities.
He discloses how government funding and developing training programs were instrumental in empowering officers against cyber threats and establishing partnerships with the private sector, Chainalysis and international law enforcement has been a key to their success.
Quote of the episode
”And it was becoming clear from all cybercrime investigations is, as you know very well, that there was always that kind of crypto and blockchain link, obviously, and a real focus on ransomware, over the last few years.” – Andrew Gould (Detective Chief Superintendent & Cybercrime Team Lead,(NPCC))
Minute-by-minute episode breakdown
2 | Early Days of UK Cybercrime and Bitcoin
5 | Role of the National Police Chiefs’ Council in the UK
8 | Building a National Capability in Cybercrime
12 | Combining Blockchain Data with Other Data Sets
15 | Partnerships with Private Sector and Future Vision of Law Enforcement Collaborations
18 | Challenges and Best Practices in Building Crypto Capacity In Law Enforcement
23 |Future of Crypto Investigations – Looking Toward 2030
25 | Seizing Crypto Criminal Proceeds to Finance Law Enforcement Capacity Building
Related resources
Check out more resources provided by Chainalysis that perfectly complement this episode of the Public Key.
- Website: NPCC: Bringing UK police leaders together to set direction in policing and drive progress for the public
- Announcement: National Cybercrime Team Awarded Chainalysis Public-Private Partnership Award at Links 2025
- Reports: NCCP POLICING VISION 2030 Report: Strategic Policing Partnership Board
- Blog: Legislated Sanctions Evasion: How the Garantex Rebrand, Grinex, and the Ruble-Backed Token, A7A5 Have Shaped Russia’s Shadow Crypto Economy
- Blog: The US and Canada Join Forces to Combat Scams, Seizing Millions in Crypto
- Blog: Chainalysis Rapid is Here: AI-Powered Crypto Triage for Any Investigator
- YouTube: Chainalysis YouTube page
- Twitter: Chainalysis Twitter: Building trust in blockchain
Speakers on today’s episode
- Jim Lee (Global Head of Capacity Building, Chainalysis)
- Andrew Gould (Detective Chief Superintendent & Cybercrime Team Lead, National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC)
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Transcript
Jim
All right, Mr. Andrew gold, appreciate you being here in the Chainalysis Office for our public key podcast, just to kind of open up for our listeners by way of introduction, so the listeners have a little bit of context of who you are. Can you just provide a little bit of a background about your crypto journey, say, over the past 10 years or
Andrew G.
so? Sure. Thanks very much, Jim. It’s good to be here. So my name is Andrew Gould. I’m a temporary commander in the City of London police, but my primary role is to look after cyber crime for the whole of UK policing. So we have in the UK what’s known as the National Police Chiefs Council. All the Chiefs get together of all the forces, about 50 forces, England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and they come together to agree how we best approach different crime types or other challenges or issues we have within policing to try and come up with a collaborative, common response. So the City of London has the permanent responsibility for cyber crime and economic crime and fraud, as well as a few other areas, and cyber crime is my primary area. So I’ve been involved in cyber crime for the last 11 years or so. I joined the Metropolitan Police in London back in 1998 did like the full range of kind of local street policing, uniform detective work in South London, and then post 77 back in 2005 and the terrorist attacks of one of those officers that I’ve actually been first on scene, one of the first officers and seen in two terrorist attacks in London over my career, that was the big focus for us, sort of mid, mid naughties. So I moved into terrorism. Then we were creating the new counter terrorism capability across whole of the UK. Counter Terrorism command in London moved into terrorism. Spent nine years in terrorism, finishing up heading up terrorism investigations and operations in the UK and abroad. And I got to be honest, probably quite worn out. These things have a shelf life. You’re permanently on call, kind of, you know, high risk, lot of responsibility. And when you run into investigations, you don’t kind of take a day off or a week off and hand them over to someone else. You kind of keep them in perpetuity. So I was looking for a bit of a change, actually, recently got divorced, wanted to spend a bit more time with the kids, bit of a change of focus. And there was this kind of new thing of cyber crime floating around. And the met at the time, wanted to build a new capability, new teams, and I was asked to be part of setting that up. Moved into cyber crime some, Gosh, 11 years ago now, never, never imagined 11 years later I’d still still be here, working in that space. So it kind of the crypto journey for me. I remember being an investigator in terrorism back in 2012 and getting our first briefing on this new thing, Bitcoin. And some of the intelligence guys came in and were saying, you know, this is, this is a new thing for terrorist financing. Potentially, we’re going to talk you through how it works and look how much it’s gone up in value in the last couple of years. And we all sat there laughing and going, Well, we really missed out on that opportunity. If only we knew then what we know now, I would have invested a bit more a bit earlier, and who knows, I may not even be sat here, be sat on a beach somewhere. That was the first introduction to crypto. And then 2014 moving into cyber crime and taking on the Met Cyber Crime Unit, sort of 2015 was the beginning of that crypto journey. And I remember sitting with my team trying to work out we’re about to do our first Bitcoin seizure, looking at a guy called grant West, or also known as corvoisier, on those.net markets. He used to hack, steal financial credentials, whether it’s them to the public or organizations use them to fund his lifestyle. And he was also drug dealing on the dark web as well. So we had managed to get a key log on to his laptop, and we were live streaming all his criminality into the office over a two week period, which was just fascinating, just seeing the scale. This is a guy that never slept. It seemed we struggled to keep up with it all. But that was our first kind of, you know, we were doing manual investigation of the blockchain. We were trying to work out, how on earth are we going to store this? We don’t, you know, a lot of the exchanges didn’t exist back then. Those that did, we suddenly didn’t have a relationship. So we were kind of working out how to manage, effectively, having a million pounds worth of bitcoin on our hardware wallet in a safe with a recovery seat split in two different safes under the responsibility of a Sargeant and inspector just you would never manage a million pounds worth of cash in policing in that way. And that was a real struggle, a real challenge. And we look how far we’ve come over the last few years, it’s been, it’s been quite a journey. You bring
Jim
back memories from my time at IRS criminal investigation and very same topics and conversations, you know, kind of in those early days, quite interesting. This chainalysis, public key podcast reaches a wide audience, and you got a ton of experience with Met Police. You also mentioned the national police chiefs Council, and so for those in our global audience that might not be familiar with the NPCC, can you just explain that organization’s role and how you actually have national reach to every police force in the UK?
Andrew G.
Sure it is exactly that it’s having that national reach if we take kind of thematic ownership for different crime type areas, or different different thematic issues within policing, and then a chief officer will kind of take that on and lead that. And there can be all kind of manner of levels of support around that. For a lot of portfolios. It might be part time, youth officer and their staff officer trying to wrestle with some of the challenges that come with that we’re really fortunate in cyber. Crime that we’ve had quite substantial investment from government over the last few years, we’ve been able to build a capability program, cyber crime program, which I’ve led on for much of that period, really, since the end of 2017 that’s just grown with the funding and grown with the interest. And that’s been a real positive. So with that national leadership comes the strategy setting, the goal setting. But what’s been really beneficial is getting that additional government money to offer it to the regional organized crime units and the force teams to kind of build that capability and get some of the benefits of efficiencies of scale through national procurement that we’ve been able to do, which you don’t see in a lot of other thematic areas. So that’s been a real positive for
Jim
- That’s interesting, how you have accounts like that’s willing to do that. I’m curious. MPC, you just explained some of the organization. So thinking about this from the beginning, what sparked that organization, NPCs, interest in building crypto investigative capability. So
Andrew G.
there’s a real recognition that policing in the UK was first started building a cyber crime capability. Probably back in 2011 the Met Police were the first we got the Flying Squad in London, very iconic UK policing brand and team done some amazing operational work over more than 100 years. And there was a recognition that as crime was changing, we wanted to create, like a cyber Flying Squad. So the Met did that kind of back in the day for some of the more higher high end impact of cyber crimes. But that wasn’t really delivering for anybody outside of London, and it certainly wasn’t delivering for victims at scale. So over a period of time, government at the time was were looking at developing a national cyber security strategy and program of activity under that. And the previous cyber lead for mpcc, a chief constable the name of Pete Goodman, really, I guess, the father of the network, really, to be fair to Pete, he was absolutely brilliant. He persuaded government of the need to actually build a policing capability that covered the whole of the country so every force would have the same minimum level of standards. So it started with our regional organized crime units. So we had, like, a higher level network looking at organized crime groups and a bit of hostile state working alongside the new National Crime Agency, which was established in 2015 really, really really close working relationships with the NCA and the National Cyber Crime Unit there, but the regional teams and the NCA were really good at showing the benefit and success that policing could bring. But again, that didn’t benefit victims at volume. So the average member of public was getting no service from policing. The average organization business was getting no service from policing. So we were able to evidence what we were doing could work on a small scale, but we needed to scale that up. So sort of 2017, 18 again, we go back to the home office, we go back to government. We make a case to build those teams of government funding. So all of the capability we built for cyber crime in UK policing, it was like the government recognized the importance and the opportunity before policing did so by offering up that funding and that support, we were able to go to Chief constables and say, Look, if you’re willing to invest your staff in building this capability so you’ve got this within your own forces for your own communities, we’ll fund it and we’ll run it. And they bought into that massively.
Jim
That’s unbelievable. You talked about funding and you talked about national reach. Can you recall, or were there any like early investigative wins that helped push the government to invest more, or help your organization invest more in blockchain technology,
Andrew G.
absolutely. I mean, there were a few. So grant West is a good is example. But back in sort of 2015 that was the second ever UK policing seizure. The first was in the was in the southeast, their cyber crime unit down there, and it was becoming clear from all cyber crime investigations, as you know very well, that there was always that kind of crypto and blockchain link, obviously, and a real focus on ransomware over the last few years. So it was really an exercise in showing this is an integral part of what we need to do to be effective. There are these amazing tools out there now, like we get through chainalysis, that can actually help professionalize and improve and help us scale that kind of capability in that operational work. So that was a that was a good example. We’ve had the huge the Metropolitan polices and seizure and what they call operation manner linked to a kind of Chinese investment fraud that’s a very large sum of money that’s come just from one investigation, and that that’s just a great way of being able to show to government the opportunity for the recovery of criminal assets, but also the opportunity to use the blockchain as an investigative tool, not just to seize assets, but to help us work with our other capabilities to identify and locate broader cyber criminals, which is obviously a real priority for
Jim
- Yeah, I think that data on the blockchain was a real eye opener for me when I really started to understand that data that was actually available on the blockchain to help create leads in criminal investigations that might not have anything to do with crypto. I mean, there’s data there that can really help when you talk about scale and scaling people up in the thought process of building capacity, what is your thought process on building expertise with personnel? I mean, you rely on training programs, external partnerships, hiring specialized talent that knows what they’re doing. How did you think about that? You know, as you’re building this capacity?
Andrew G.
Yeah, it’s a really great question. I mean, it’s been a real I’m not saying we had the right approach, but, I mean, we’re very much kind of tied to kind of police processes. Recruitment and Talent Management and all of that kind of thing. So we’ve always had a model of, let’s grow our own investigators. So let’s take existing cops with existing investigative knowledge and experience who have a technical interest and train them up on the on the technical side. And that’s been really successful. That’s really where we’ve staffed a lot of our force and regional cyber crime units and Dark Web teams. But we’ve also, I kind of made a decision quite early on when we were building the teams, we wanted to open up more direct entry as well, to get that external talent, improve the diversity of the teams in terms of background and thought and all the rest of it. So by creating all of those posts as police staff roles as well as Officer roles, it gave forces the flexibility to externally recruit if they wanted to, and were able to. So we’ve ended up with a really good mix of external talent coming in, probably younger, more technically minded, alongside seasoned investigators. And you really getting the best of both worlds from that model?
Jim
Yeah, no, that’s right. Just to expand on that a little bit, how did you prioritize the training like across the team. Was the team only like in a specialized unit, or was it more broadly across the organization? Or how did you start?
Andrew G.
So it’s a bit of a mix. So it was primarily focused on the specialist teams, because we knew they were already doing the work without the training or the tools. So the priority was, get the tools, get the training, prove the value, and over time, broader policing will will want to get more involved. And that’s exactly what’s happened. So very much focused on train the specialists, but we broadened it out. We said this isn’t just for cyber crime units. This is for any financial investigators that we involved in broader money laundering. We were pushing quite hard some years ago to say to that world of policing, you need to diversify. You need to recognize this new threat and opportunity that comes from crypto, and train more and more of your investigators up in this space. So we offered them the training and the tooling for free as part of what we were doing to try and get that broader policing interest. And that’s been quite
Jim
successful. Sounds very similar to when I was at IRS criminal investigation, where, early on, it was dedicated to dedicated like specialized units. Looking at it, quickly realized that crypto was being used in just about every crime that was committed to make money, which is just about all of them touched on this a little bit ago. Switch back to data from the and how important data is, and the vast amount of data on the blockchain, just from your perspective, do you feel that combining blockchain data with other operational data sets, you know that’s open source or operational data that your offices are gathering, does that further enhance investigative capabilities or intelligence gathering or investigations? What’s your perspective on
Andrew G.
that massively that’s got a huge potential, and if I think about kind of the next big step forward, or kind of cyber crime or crypto investigations 2.0 that’s really the direction of travel and focus for us. So we think we’ve been really successful over the last few years, developing a capability, but doing some really high quality investigative work, partnered up with Chainalysis and other key private sector partners, we’ve kind of proved the value and the potential of working more collaboratively with the private sector, and we’ve benefited from huge efficiencies of scale by procuring tooling for the whole country, for every force and every region. We make huge efficiencies in terms of kind of price and cost. Get great level of support from the organizations that we work with, massive support from Chainalysis. But our traditional kind of model of partnership has been, if I’m being really honest, the idea of policing partnership is a bit we’ll tell you what we want, and you give us the information, and we won’t give you any feedback. But thanks very much for your help, which only takes you so far. And whilst we’ve kind of benefited from the tooling and the training, and when we’ve had specific inquiries around investigations that we’re already working on, we get a fantastic level of support. But obviously chainalysis and other companies have just got huge, as you know, better than anyone, huge data sets, global reach and understanding that the public sector and policing will never get anywhere near. We will never have that, not just the scale of data, but the tools to understand and manage that effectively. So we realized some time ago that we needed to take a new approach to this partnership. And the partnership with Chainalysis is very much our first pilot of that so kind of taking more of a like a joint task force approach in future, whereby we’d sit down with yourselves and others and say, right, this is a specific operational intelligence requirement that we have. We would like you to find UK based cyber criminals, or UK based online for instance, or money laundering opportunities where there’s crypto, where we can go out and seize to help fund what we’re doing and show value to government and others. Let’s do that as joint operational teams, and that’s what we started to do over the last probably three or four months. And the quality of the work or potential work that your guys and girls are bringing us, the potential is massive. It’s absolutely huge. And we’re already starting to see the benefits. But that policing, private sector partnership, for me, is the future of policing. I think that there’s so much potential. We’re kind of starting in cyber crime and fraud and money laundering, but as you said, it impacts all organized crime. There’s so much potential to take this wider into all organized crime and terrorism, and we’re viewing ourselves as a pilot to show the rest of the policing that the way that we can go and create a collaboration. With the private
Jim
sector. Yeah, it sounds, I mean, that’s a great, a fantastic vision to think that way. I know, speaking for law enforcement agency, I come in and talking to law enforcement agencies, you know, deconfliction and being able to talk for investigative efficiency and just even officer safety, sharing information better, as opposed to being one way, I I know it’s a challenge. It sounds like you got a really good vision on on how you want to move that forward. And in my mind, when I hear that, I it screams investigative efficiency and officer safety,
Andrew G.
absolutely. And I think one of by putting on a more kind of formalized professional footing, it’s a commercial relationship as well as an operational relationship. And that brings some real benefits in that it’s all contractually based. We’ve got the right data sharing agreements in place, the right vetting in place. There’s a proper bedrock foundation that this is built on, that eminently scalable, and you can point this capability in any direction depending on what threat type you want to look at. So we view this very much as a pilot for the rest of policing, but the early benefits and some of the early opportunities that you’re bringing to us are incredibly exciting, I think, for policing, genuinely transformational.
Jim
Thinking back over years or so or as you were standing this up, do you recall any mistakes that you made? Are something that you would have done differently? I mean, would you have done anything differently when you’re developing crypto investigative capacity in
Andrew G.
the organization? Gosh, yeah, probably not. You know what it’s like in kind of law enforcement and lots of organizations, you always focus on the things that didn’t go so well or could go better, and you forget probably sometimes the things that went well. I think cyber crime is not an area of priority for most of policing. We’ve got this capability because government have invested in it. Chiefs have seen the value in it, but they’ve allowed us to support their teams and train their teams, but they’ve largely left us to get on with it, which has had a lot of benefits, because we’ve been able to get on and deliver and have a modicum of success. But I think what we’ve not done so well is actually communicate some of that to wider policing. We’ve not done such a great job of communicating their potential to wider policing and the benefits and the success, but also the wider public. There’s some amazing operational work going on in a lot of different areas, and we’ve never really succeeded in finding a way to across a fragmented 54 system where each force have got their own communication priorities and we never want to take credit for other people’s work, but finding a way of identifying those really good jobs and promoting the benefits and the opportunities and the success to kind of impact public confidence is really, really important, and also to get mainstream policing to recognizing a wallet or a recovery seed when they’re on a search for drugs or firearms or something else, that broader kind of awareness raising so we’re not missing opportunities is really important. So I think there’s definitely more we can
Jim
do in that space communication. Part of it strikes me, just because I always thought, you know that if you had a really good communication strategy, that creates deterrence, just in and of itself, and just anybody that’s considering to do something bad with it or around, you know, the cyberspace or crypto space, if they know you’re looking at it just that alone and talking about it creates they might think twice about doing that. And if and sorry, speaking of partnerships, do you feel that international, like public private partnerships are important to address the speed at which value can move across borders these days,
Andrew G.
massively? And that’s that’s another benefit that you get from partnering properly with the with the private sector, because we’ve got global relationships with a lot of law enforcement, but we haven’t got relationships with with everybody, and actually a lot of private sector partners often do because of the International jurisdictions that you will work in. So there are opportunities sometimes, to leverage those relationships, to get those introductions to those teams, or to help disrupt those money flows. So there’s huge potential. The challenge is always, as everybody knows, is the speed with which this happens, and then the delays of the justice system grinds a lot and trying to catch up, it’s a struggle. But by not trying to investigate every crime, but by identifying the main threat actors and just focusing on them, we can have some really impactive, disruptive effect. And I think we’re increasingly starting
Jim
to see that, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s definitely interesting. So how about, from your perspective, being a great partner of chainalysis, what specialized training or expertise does law enforcement need? From your experience that chainalysis
Andrew G.
could actually provide? So I think one of the benefits from the amazing tooling that we get, and the increasing sophistication of that, of that tooling, you know, officers have got to have a basic or a decent level of understanding of how the tooling works. But also, you know, the basic fundamentals of how blockchain works and all of that kind of stuff is really, really important. So I think where we’ve been really fortunate in the past is to benefit from that high quality training for our specialist investigators. But I think what’s what some of the conversations we’ve been having over the last couple of years is the couple of years is the importance of being able to more and more put some of the tooling in the hands of more inexperienced investigators, to make it more more accessible at that more mainstream policing level. And I think one of the things that Chainalysis is doing really well is some of the tooling that’s that’s being provided those officers and staff that. Don’t have that high level of training and won’t get that access to that greater level of support, can do some basic Intelligence Research functions in a way that just hasn’t been accessible before. So I think for chain analysis and other companies, if want to broaden open access for tooling and capability to law enforcement or other areas, the tools have got to be intuitive and easy to use without without any training. And I think that that’s very much the direction of travel, which is really positive. But you’ll always need those specialists that do have that extra training, do have the ability to really get under the bonnet and get into the data and really understand what the analysis is telling them and showing them. We’ll always need
Jim
those experts. So great feedback. You know, going back to a challenge you mentioned, well, I viewed it as a challenge. I know a lot of law enforcement departments viewed as a challenge, going back to the funding piece and understanding that funding is critical to build out any type of new program. Can you just talk a little bit more? How did you convince decision makers that crypto investigative capacity was actually important for the
Andrew G.
organization, it’s actually surprisingly easy. Often, the way law enforcement will approach a new threat area or new capability challenge will be to try and do some operational work in that space, kind of proof of concept, or get that greater understanding of how to maybe manage it or investigate it, and then try and find the resources to tackle it. We’ve almost not quite done the reverse approach. But when you’ve got full time cyber crime program team nationally, or it was just me back in 2017 but when you’re you’re able to kind of dedicate staff the time to develop those cross government relationships, whether it’s with the key law enforcement partners, for us, National Crime Agency, National Cyber Security Center, but the policy leads within for us, home office at the cyber policy unit have been fantastic allies for us over the last nearly 10 years or so, and some of the staff there have been there in this world for as long as I have, so they’ve got a real deep policy expertise that is increasingly being shared more broadly across home office and wider government. So with the track record of delivery, we’ve been able to share in a number of areas, hopefully gives us some credibility when we then go into government to say, well, actually, we need to build this, or develop this, or this is what it looks like, and this the potential. We’re trusted partners, and that’s really, really important. So when you’ve got that trusted relationship, it becomes a much easier discussion and a much easier set because, like any kind of sales, it’s not a cold call, it’s part of an ongoing discussion and relationship about, how do we improve? How do we get better? So selling the concept was very easy. The challenge, then is to find the money in government to do that, and the policy officials within the home office have done a brilliant job in helping us to
Jim
do that. Yeah, I recall some quick investigative lens actually demonstrate that crypto was being used to facilitate or move or introduce illicit income in the financial system, when we’re actually able to show that people, especially senior people, really started taking notice to that. So it’s very similar,
Andrew G.
exactly the same. It’s like policy officials are evidence led, as you’d expect. So bringing the evidence never had any challenge or issue, persuading people that need the challenge as ever public sector is finding the money
Jim
I asked you about. Can you think of any mistake that you would have done differently? We’ve got senior law enforcement officials around the globe that really listen to this podcast, and so when it comes to building crypto investigative capacity in an organization, can you think of a best practice to build capacity in law enforcement investigation that’s worked for you.
Andrew G.
I think one of the areas of challenge for us is is retention. We’ve spent a lot of time and effort investing in our staff who’ve got a high level of capability, but there isn’t the clear career progression within policing where you can get promoted or get lateral development and stay within cyber crime, because our teams, although we’re a network of seven or 800 officers and staff across the country. They’re all employed by their own forces, so so they can’t move across force particularly easily. So that career progression to stay is really hard. We have a much higher attrition rate people going to the private sector, as you would expect. Now, we always used to look at that as a real negative, but actually, in the last sort of year or so, we started to recognize that as a bit of a positive, because many of those staff have ended up in some have ended up here or in other blockchain invested companies or other private sector partners, and they’ve got a real deep understanding and background in understanding how we work, the things that need to be done for us better. Use things in evidence, and they understand our capability gaps as well. So that’s really helped, I think, drive a lot of innovation that we would never have seen if we tried to build capability ourselves. That’s been a massive, massive positive. I think what we have found lessons learned for others. We trained officers and staff in every force in the country because it’s really important that everybody has access to this sort of basic level of tool they can support. But what we found, because the teams are so small, there’s a real lack of resilience and support for those officers and staff. And if you’re going to get good at this stuff, you need to be doing it full time. You need to really hone your skills. You need to be working with other investigators in this space. So whilst every local team or every local police force needs this specialist capability, we need to build more resilient, bigger teams nationally or regionally. So you’ve got that benefit of a bigger group of people coming together. It’s easier for us to maintain those skills and those specialism. We can manage the Career Development and Support, make them feel more valued and supported, make sure they’re getting the right operational work coming through, which is what they want to do. That’s one of the main attractions for staying in policing. So I think having that kind of critical mass at the center of capability to help plug any gaps locally and support and develop the staff best is probably the most important approach.
Jim
I’m curious. Imagine it’s the year 2030, can you share where you see the crypto investigative capabilities of well, whether it’s the London Police Department or the mpcc? I mean, where are we at in the next five years investigative
Andrew G.
capability line? I think it’ll be what we’re doing now, but on steroids. So we’ve much, much bigger scale, much closer collaboration and partnership with the private sector. I think we’ll be working across all threat types, not just cyber crime and economic crime. I think policing will have seen the benefit and the value. I think we’ve had a lot of operational success across a lot of different areas. And I think it will all be funded by the seizures of criminal crypto as well. So it won’t cost the government or the taxpayer a penny. That’s the vision for the next five years. A stronger task force approach, a bigger intelligence capability at the center, managing that tasking, that leadership function, that HQ function, if you like, but much deeper collaboration with partners to really drive that Operational Activity nationally, regionally and locally.
Jim
Yeah, that’s great. And yeah, seizures, yes, another great return on investment that actually can convince or persuade or just demonstrate, illustrate the success of being able to understand the technology and the data, how useful it is for law enforcement,
Andrew G.
absolutely. I mean, we’re sat on about 4.2 billion pounds worth of criminal proceeds, and that every force in the country has made seizures. Every regional team has made seizures. So there’s huge potential there. And that’s all money that’s primarily going to come back to government and policing. And increasingly we want to be seizing victim funds to repatriate that to victims as well. So when you start to show the sums involved, and you compare that to the old fashioned cash seizures that we see, that people start to see the potential, and ideally, we can get this to be self funding.
Jim
I know you’re a busy man, I really appreciate you coming and spending a little bit of time, you know, here Chainalysis. Appreciate all the work that you’re doing, really around, you know, the whole UK and internationally, and our partnerships, and just appreciate your time. Thanks. Thank you very much.