Asset protection represents adversaries’ ongoing efforts to preserve their now apparently legitimate wealth from law enforcement scrutiny, judicial seizure, or international sanctions. This protection involves actively managing and adjusting asset holdings—maintaining them in liquid, easily movable forms, placing them behind protective legal structures or arrangements, and rapidly repositioning them geographically if a threat emerges. Criminal actors proactively anticipate enforcement actions or investigative advances, ensuring that any assets under suspicion can swiftly shift to new ownership, jurisdictions, or asset types. Detection at this stage often demands real-time cross-border investigative cooperation, sophisticated asset-tracing methods, and vigilance for frequent changes in asset custody, jurisdictional location, or ownership structures that lack logical economic explanation.
Asset Protection
Techniques Under This Tactic
By embedding funds within layers of nominee-held entities in secrecy-friendly jurisdictions, criminals reduce the risk of detection or successful seizure actions, preserving long-term control over illicit wealth.
Criminals use informal value transfer systems to quickly convert between different types of assets to maintain flexible and readily movable funds, allowing them to pivot rapidly if detection risks change.
By enabling quick conversion between cash and cryptocurrency, criminals maintain flexible and readily movable funds, allowing them to pivot rapidly if detection risks change.
By filing appeals, mounting legal challenges, or otherwise delaying asset-freezing orders through manipulated court procedures, criminals safeguard illicit proceeds from seizure and preserve long-term access to these funds.
High portability and subjective valuation of precious metals and stones allow for swift conversion into cash or other assets. This provides criminals with readily transferable illicit funds that can be redeployed globally while minimizing detection risk.
By converting proceeds into gold, offenders maintain a highly liquid, quickly transferable store of value that can be redeployed or relocated with ease, ensuring continued control over illicit assets.
Diamonds' high portability and subjective valuation allow for swift conversion into cash or other assets. This provides criminals with readily transferable illicit funds that can be redeployed globally while minimizing detection risk.
Loyalty point systems allow for large, unmonitored balances and provide near-cash redemption options, enabling the quick conversion and transfer of illicit funds with minimal scrutiny.
Criminals use freeports and private storage to secure high-value illicit assets out of law enforcement's reach, preventing seizure and preserving long-term control of their wealth. The opaque nature of these facilities reduces transparency and hinders investigations, aligning squarely with the goal of safeguarding illicit proceeds post-integration.