CBI setting up specialised unit to track bank crimes, criminals

New Delhi: In the wake of large-scale bank frauds that the country has seen in the last few years, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), on the lines of Interpol’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre (IFCACC), is going to set up a technology centre that will specifically focus on unearthing economic crimes and identify the perpetrators and their modus operandi.
This specialised vertical, that will also employ private specialists, will use the latest technology to sieve through troves of documents and layers to unearth siphoning of public funds.
This centre, named Centralized Technology Vertical (CTV), which will be a part of the Fraud Analytics project, will function from Delhi and will have an in-house central capacity for supporting specialized crime investigations dealing with Digital Forensic Analysis, Forensic Accounting and Fraud Analytics.
A brainchild of the present CBI director, Subodh Kumar Jaiswal, who had a long stint with the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), the centre will be equipped with state of the art forensic tools that are required for analysing massive data to identify patterns, trails, frauds, discrepancies and provide support to investigation of complex cases. The centre will also have manpower trained in advanced levels of digital forensic analysis.
The tender for setting up this centre was released on 7 January this year, exactly one month before the CBI made the Rs 22,000 crore ABG Shipyard scam public. The CBI was first informed about this scam in November 2019.
Apart from this massive scam, the CBI is investigating the Rs 11,000 crore bank scam committed by Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi and other similar financial scams carried out by Vijay Mallya and the Sandesara brothers that involve embezzling public money.
The CBI, without any visible result, has also been investigating the multi crore chit funds scam like Narada for years now. The need for setting up this centre, as per CBI, was necessitated because of the complexities of economic offences and financial crimes which have been constantly increasing over the years. As per the 2017 Annual Report, the CBI had registered a total of 1,076 cases. Out of these total cases, 687 cases came under Anti-Corruption Division, 195 under Special Crimes Division, while the remaining 194 were dealt by the Economic Offenses Division.
According to the CBI, these financial scams involve a multitude of entities through which a large number of financial transactions are done, crisscrossing geographical boundaries. A lot of the evidence gathered during the course of these investigations is digital in nature, such as emails, text messages, audio, video and image files and other similar data on hard disks and other storage devices. The CBI also has to go through call data, tower dumps, financial statements, bank transactions etc., all of which takes months to analyse and arrive at a pattern.
The investigation of such crimes requires sophisticated text mining, data analytics tools along with the technical expertise to reconstruct the transactions and provide insights into complex crimes and it is in this scenario that the CTV will come into play, the CBI has said.
The personnel employed in CTV, who will be private individuals, will supplement the investigating team and help them in financial analysis and provide data extraction tools to support the investigating officers in analysis of large volumes of data from multiple and diverse data sources and structured as well as unstructured data. The CTV will also obtain and maintain access to data sources, develop geography-based expertise and access to international data sources.
It will also build and maintain a robust library for quickly narrowing down the suspicious transactions and anomalies. The CTV will detect and establish a money trail, search multiple and diversified information sources including social networking sites for the investigators to analyse.
It will also develop geography-specific expertise in context of flow of funds to other countries, identify the assets brought outside India by entities and individuals through the proceeds of crime and also develop a knowledge repository of known fraudsters, shell companies and suspected individuals to provide additional information on an entity for future investigations.
One of the main requirements that the CBI is focusing on, as a part of this CTV, is Data Ingestion (DI) Services. Under this, the Data Ingestion component will be required to ensure that the case data obtained by the respective IO (Investigating Officer) is ingested into a central repository, which can then enable the CBI to arrive at a holistic view of the data for further analysis. The data will be uploaded in a suitable format like POLE Framework (People, Objects, Location, and Events) which allows creation of master records for an entity.
The data ingested from diverse sources will then be analysed to identify the anomalies, patterns, clusters, network of entities, etc and provide support to investigation of complex cases. The CYV will analyse the inputs by taking help of subject matter experts.
Once the CTV is in place, as per the CBI, it will enhance the number of leads that may open up to an Investigating Officer vis-a-vis the current methods employed in investigations which involve identification of documents like fake invoices, fake turnover, false accounting, fake security document (legal papers, FDRs, note of value), DEMAT account trades, etc., that help in uncovering manifestations of crime.
It will also enable collation and analysis of data, provide a database for use in future cases, encapsulate the understanding of modus operandi used in effecting a crime and developing typology [example, transfer of money abroad, cash withdrawal via multiple accounts, multi-layering of accounts], allow semantic classification of material and buildup of lexicon in due course of time.
This will, in a longer run, improve quality and effectiveness of specialised investigations by leveraging expertise and advanced technologies. The CTV, as per the CBI, will analyse the digital evidence from a number of devices in a rapid manner and reconstruct the sequence of events and identify the people involved, work through multiple layers of money trail, enhance CBI’s ability to present the findings in an easily understandable format in the courts, visually represent the complex analysis (timeline analysis, concept clustering) and document a clear link between the information being presented and the original source and build in-house capacity and become self-reliant to conduct investigations leveraging advanced technologies in the long run.