High-tech's thin blue line
Published: 05 Apr 2005 15:50 BST
The group receives roughly £5m a year in funding on top of the initial £25m injection it received nearly four years ago to get started. Despite the increasing sophistication of the criminal gangs the NHTCU finds itself up against, the force has never lost a case. Deats says there are two main ways to catch people — you can follow the money or sniff out the technical trail.
"Money is designed to have an audit trail with it," he says. "And obviously connectivity through the Net isn't. It's difficult to trace it technically, but nevertheless we will try. By following both lines you find different [specialists]."
The NHTCU is currently using the "follow-the-money" tactic to track down two Russian men who have been on the run since a multi-million pound money-laundering plot was foiled.
Five other Russians have been charged in relation to the operation in question and ten men in Latvia have been arrested after authorities caught them withdrawing money that was extorted from a UK-based online gambling company. The company was told to pay up or face a series of hacking and denial-of-service attacks against its Web servers.
The NHTCU advised the betting firm to pay extortion demands after the betting site received several emails threatening to bring down their business.
"We did so to watch where the money went," says Deats. "[It] went to Latvia. It was one of the places we'd done training and put surveillance teams on the ground.
"We watched for them to come for the money. Some people came to pick it up in foreign currencies, but they weren't picking up our money. Then they picked up ours. They took a slice and transferred the rest to Moscow. Two individuals are still wanted in Russia."
Eastern Europe and Russia have been two of the hardest regions for the NHTCU to penetrate. Deats freely admits that the majority of online crime stems from this area, but over the last year his team has been there working with counterparts to train officers in methods of tackling cybercriminals.
The best way to catch a cybercriminal is by acting fast, he advises. Hesitation and the plodding routine that can be effective in some areas of police work can often result in lost evidence in the online world.
"In a typical drugs case, you need a pretty rapid entry otherwise you're going to lose the evidence and the drugs go down the toilet," says Deats. In our scenario, plugs come out of the wall and encryption kicks in. You've got to be able to react fast. When encryption kicks in, things become harder."
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