Crime-Stopping Technology

Technology solutions supplied to law enforcement agencies by LexisNexis^® Risk Solutions helped solve these cases.

In fact, these essential tools work in overdrive every day to keep the country safer by tracking criminals, preventing violent crime and helping to recover missing children.

But in an age when threats never stop and continue to evolve — so much so that many crimes are now considered borderless — how do understaffed and underfunded law enforcement agencies keep ahead of the criminals and the kind of crimes that most of us never would have imagined 20 years ago?

If you ask any law enforcement officer what is the key to safe communities, they’ll tell you it’s not about catching the criminals after the crime. It’s about stopping the crime in the first place. And that takes powerful tools like the ones that LexisNexis Risk Solutions has been using for years in partnership with many of the country’s 18,000 federal, state, city and local law enforcement agencies to accelerate their ability to solve cases and prevent further crime.

By getting the right technology solutions into the hands of law enforcement and public safety professionals, they can identify the right person, right door, right car, right house, right business faster to move the needle on crimes across the board.

This benefits everyone because early identification and quick apprehension help prevent crimes from escalating.

Linking Digital and Physical Evidence

Years ago, the stereotype was of a guy in his mom’s basement demanding meatloaf while on his computer conducting identity theft or exploiting a child. We have Will Ferrell to thank for that image, but now cyber crimes come from all over the world including Russia, Eastern Europe, Asia and parts of Africa. And for those who’ve worked in the trenches — like the team of experts at LexisNexis Risk Solutions who collectively have hundreds of years of prior law enforcement experience as detectives, special agents, command staff and analysts — they know the focus cannot let up because it’s a race.

“Organized groups of criminals take their business very seriously and are reinvesting portions of illicit proceeds to purchase additional technology,” explains Michael Breslin, who spent 24 years in the United States Secret Service and now works with public safety agencies across the country as the Strategic Client Relations Director for Federal Law Enforcement at LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

Today, using a whole host of solutions, government agencies and law enforcement can make timely and informed decisions to enhance investigations by utilizing insights that tie together physical and digital evidence.

Take a cold case from 1971, for example, involving the homicide of Isadore “Izzy” Pacht. After 34 years of periodic case reviews at the request of the Pacht family, it remained cold due to outdated, incomplete and inaccurate information included in the original case file. It wasn’t until 2005 after the New York Governor’s office assigned the case to detectives of the 48th Precinct New York City Detective Squad that the case was solved. And that’s thanks to the detective squad having access to the powerful public records database from LexisNexis Risk Solutions that includes law enforcement data from  thousands of contributing agencies, according to Tom Joyce, who was the Lieutenant Commander of the New York Police Department Cold Case Squad at the time and is now Director of Public Safety, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Government.

“As a result, we tracked down and re-interviewed key witnesses from 1971 and located the final living suspect using address information revealed by the LexisNexis^® Accurint^® solution. In the end, we were able to obtain a confession using the 'associates and relatives' linked feature within Accurint^®,” recalls Joyce.

Today, there are many pressing security challenges facing our nation.

According to Michael Hartenstein, Director of Public Safety Business Development within LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Government, who is a former United States Secret Service agent on presidential duty for 12 years, identity solutions are key to helping government agencies protect everyone from the public to presidents.

“Our country has a series of special, large-scale events in the next couple of years: the Presidential Inauguration, the FIFA World Cup, the NBA All-star Game, the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 2028. The United States Secret Service conducts security for these events and needs to make sure that the people coming into these events are who they say they are — because a truck filled with food driving up to the gate could be hiding explosives or any number of possible threat vectors. Through the LexisNexis^® True ID^® and our Accurint^® Virtual Crime Center, we can tell if it’s really the person they claim to be and put an end to the threat.”

According to Breslin, there are three major identity crimes that Americans should be watchful of: fraud, impersonation and social engineering.

And while fraud used to be along the lines of writing a bad check to the bank or stealing money from a business, it’s much more specialized today with identity fraud, bank fraud, COVID relief fraud, unemployment fraud, disability fraud and electronic benefit transfer (EBT) fraud where criminals are stealing benefits from citizens who are in need. 

He explains that cyberterrorists often go on the dark web to buy kits to conduct mass phishing and ransomware attacks on people and businesses. These groups then mask the IP addresses and conduct crimes against U.S. citizens from various points around the world.

“90% of all counterfeiting is overseas, so it’s all borderless today,” Hartenstein adds.

Once the fraud happens, it’s too late because the money’s gone. That’s why cutting-edge fraud prevention tools like identity proofing systems for authentication are used to help government agencies stop crime before it happens. 

Just a few months ago, LexisNexis Risk Solutions helped the United States Secret Service with a nationwide crackdown to combat massive consumer fraud that is stealing much-needed money from low-income American families. The investigation targeted 49 suspects from transnational organized crime groups engaged in credit card skimming that use hidden skimmers installed on credit card machines and ATMs to steal public-assistance benefits. 

Impersonation is another threat that’s crept into the criminal’s toolbox. By misusing artificial intelligence (AI), they’ve increased their capability to impersonate using deep fakes, commonly pretending to be celebrities and politicians.

And the third bucket in the arsenal of today’s identity criminal is social engineering. Again, they’re using AI and the dark web as their avenue of choice ― now commonly referred to as “fraud as a service” instead of “cybercrime as a service” — to conduct massive ransomware attacks where they can mimic the style of writing of, for instance, the CEO of a business.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions technology tools like identity verification, authentication and background checks are vital for law enforcement, according to Breslin, because they act as a fortress to get ahead of the fraud before it happens. 

The vast amounts of evidence today are creating new threats for law enforcement agencies to worry about, Breslin points out. With reams and reams of data coming in through cell phones, video cameras and body cams to name a few, there’s too much data for investigators to sift through.

“There’s a fear that AI groups could erase it and wipe away data that is potentially crucial evidence,” Breslin states.

Solutions are also put in place so that attorneys, prosecutors and district attorneys at the state and federal levels can protect any outside threats from tampering with evidence. 

Missing and exploited children continue to be a massive challenge globally. According to the National Center for Missing Exploited Children (NCMEC), their CyberTipline received a staggering 36.2 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation in 2023. 63,892 of these cases were urgent and involved children in imminent danger and were immediately escalated to law enforcement. Child sex trafficking is one form of exploitation that has exploded with the ease of access and low cost of the internet. Of the more than 25,000 cases of children reported missing to NCMEC in 2023 who had run away, one in six were likely victims of child sex trafficking. Today, the average age of child sex trafficking victims reported missing to NCMEC is a mere 15 years old. 

NCMEC has also seen a 323% increase in online enticement reports to the Cyber Tipline between 2021 and 2023. Included in this category are sextortion cases, where teenage boys between the ages of 12 to 15 are commonly targeted. Similar to financial extortion crimes, the offender demands money from the child in exchange for not exposing sexually explicit videos or pictures of the child. The FBI reports 13,000 cases of sextortion were filed between 2021 and 2023 and there are more than 20 known suicides that resulted from this act.  

LexisNexis Risk Solutions has a long history of working with NCMEC and has aided in the rescue of more than 900 missing children through intelligence packages and back-end technology (information and analytics). In addition, LexisNexis Risk employee Trish McCall co-founded a highly successful initiative called the ADAM (Automated Delivery of Alerts on Missing Children) Program^TM that NCMEC uses to quickly distribute missing child posters and case details to police, news media, schools, businesses, medical centers and everyday citizens who have opted into the program. 

According to Breslin, who serves on the NCMEC board of directors, in 2023 the ADAM Program was used by NCMEC to distribute nearly 1.2 million poster alerts on 1,672 missing child cases.

ADAM Program Helps Rescue Children

• A family of five children were safely recovered from a remote area in the woods in rural Missouri after the ADAM program pinpointed a small town where the children were seen getting supplies. 
• A 1-year-old child missing from Texas was recovered after a concerned citizen recognized her from an ADAM poster alert seen in a local convenience store. 
• Three months after going missing, a 17-year-old child was safely recovered in Atlanta after an officer with the Metro Atlanta Police Department recognized her from the ADAM poster they had received.  

Signing up for the ADAM Program is easy: adamprogram.com