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In early January 2025, Interpol published its first Silver Notice seeking information about assets held worldwide by a senior member of the Italian mafia. The Silver Notice is the latest addition to Interpol’s suite of color-coded notices, the most well-known of which is the Red Notice seeking the arrest of wanted persons.
The purpose of the Silver Notice is to identify and recover assets obtained during the commission of criminal offenses in order to combat money laundering and cross-border organized crime. Through this notice, countries can request information to locate assets (including vehicles, financial accounts, crypto wallets and businesses) that are linked to a person’s (and not a corporation’s) suspected criminal offenses, such as fraud, corruption, terrorism, cybercrime, drug trafficking and other serious offenses. Countries may subsequently use such information as a basis for requests for seizure, confiscation or recovery of assets linked to such offenses, 99% of which, according to Interpol’s Secretary-General, remain unrecovered to date.
In other words, a Silver Notice may be published in order to combat a wide variety of offenses, such as to obtain information about the assets of a company whose employees committed Internet fraud; or about assets smuggled by a senior member of a criminal organization who is suspected of bribing a public servant to promote the organization’s criminal businesses.
The Silver Notice application is currently in its pilot phase (which was launched in December 2023 and will run until at least November 2025), in which Fifty-two countries are participating (Israel is not a participant). The launch of the pilot phase and the first decision in this matter, demonstrate that Interpol has set an important goal for itself of fighting intetnational organized crime by targeting the sources of funding for criminal organizations.
The recognition that targeting profits and financial means is an effective tool for fighting international organized crime is not new, and was actually used frequently against the Hamas terrorist organization after October 7, 2023. The Silver Notice may serve as an additional tool in the toolbox to disrupt criminal networks in such manner.
In fact, it seems that already today, the United States, which is participating in the pilot and which last year filed an indictment against senior members of Hamas (most of whom have since been eliminated), can request the issue of a Silver Notice in order to locate their assets in other member states and subsequently request their confiscation. Similarly, at the end of the pilot phase, and to the extent that Interpol decides to include the Silver Notice in its permanent arsenal, the State of Israel will also be able to submit such a request, as well as similar requests targeting the economic infrastructure of senior members of other terrorist organizations.
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Adv. Shir Rozenzweig is an associate at Barnea, Jaffa, Lande & Co. specializing in white-collar crime and regulatory enforcement in Israel and abroad.
