Fraud and cyber-enabled crime continue to grow in both scale and sophistication. What is particularly striking is how efficiently bad actors can now operate: with minimal operational cost, a single campaign can target millions of citizens, and only a small number of successful victims are required to generate significant financial gain. The consequences for those victims, however, are often severe and long-lasting.
In parallel, there is a positive development taking place. More law enforcement agencies are investing in improved digital channels that allow citizens to report fraud, attempted scams, and related intelligence online. These capabilities are not only improving accessibility for the public, but also creating an opportunity for law enforcement to triage, correlate, and investigate cybercrime far more effectively than was previously possible.
Recently, I was inspired by a customer who took a particularly pragmatic approach to this challenge. Rather than acquiring an entirely new technology stack, they extended the use of their existing i2 capabilities to address the growing demands of fraud and cybercrime reporting. This demonstrated how technology that is already deployed within many agencies can be repurposed to solve emerging problems, often more quickly and cost-effectively than expected.
Two characteristics define modern fraud and cybercrime:
The sheer number of reports, attempted scams, indicators, and intelligence submissions can be overwhelming. Manual handling is no longer viable, and without automation, valuable information risks being overlooked.
These crimes frequently span jurisdictions, exploit rapidly evolving techniques, and involve networks of actors rather than isolated individuals. For law enforcement, keeping pace requires not only new skills, but also technology capable of handling complex relationships and high-velocity data.
Against this backdrop, several common requirements consistently emerge across agencies.
Agencies need simple, internet-based mechanisms that allow citizens to submit reports, scam attempts, and intelligence in a structured and usable form.
Incoming information must be efficiently retrieved, automatically cross-referenced with existing fraud and cybercrime cases, and compared against internal data sources. The objective is to surface potential attribution to known actors, identify repeat patterns, and proactively alert analysts where appropriate.
Investigators require analytical capabilities that allow them to identify networks, understand relationships, and answer the fundamental questions of when, what, where, how, and why a case occurred and why it was successful.
Effective response to fraud and cybercrime often depends on multi-agency collaboration. Data must be shared efficiently with trusted partners, disseminated to other systems, and, where appropriate, shared back to the public: for example, known scam messages, email addresses, or cryptocurrency wallets to support prevention and risk awareness.
i2 iBase can serve as a central data management and analysis environment, automatically ingesting public submissions and intelligence in a graph-like network, cross-referencing them against internal systems, and supporting monitoring and alerting workflows.
Its analytical capabilities allow incoming information to be risk-profiled and scored, enabling effective triage and helping agencies deploy limited resources where they will have the greatest impact.
In addition, i2 iBase supports scheduled and automated data dissemination. This allows curated datasets to be shared with partner agencies or exported to third-party systems for further analysis and visualization, reinforcing a collaborative, ecosystem-based approach to cybercrime.
i2 Analyst’s Notebook, integrated directly with i2 iBase, enables seamless querying, analysis, and visualization of the underlying data. By revealing hidden relationships and patterns, it helps analysts make sense of complex fraud networks and supports more informed investigative decisions.
As fraud and cybercrime continue to evolve, technology investment remains essential. However, this example highlights an important lesson: significant value can often be unlocked by re-examining the capabilities of systems that are already in place.
For agencies considering how to improve cybercrime reporting, triage, and investigation, it may be worth first asking whether their existing i2 capabilities can already support part, or even most, of the solution. In many cases, the foundation is already there.
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Reach out to me or i2 Group if you would like to explore how we can help you combat Cyber Crime and Fraud.
Martin worked as a law enforcement officer and analyst at the Danish National Police for 16 years before joining i2 Group in 2015. Previously leading the EMEA technical sales team, Martin is now Global Law Enforcement Industry Leader.
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