On 10 January 2025, INTERPOL issued its first 'Silver Notice'. The Silver Notice is a new tool designed to assist with the identification and recovery of assets linked to criminal activity.
The first Silver Notice was issued at the request of the Italian authorities to help trace assets belonging to a senior member of the mafia and represents a significant step in INTERPOL's ongoing efforts to address financial and organised crime through facilitating international cooperation and information-sharing.
What is a Silver Notice?
Silver Notices (and Diffusions) aim to help INTERPOL member countries to trace, monitor, and recover criminal assets. It enables countries to share information about assets linked to criminal activities such as fraud, corruption, drug trafficking, terrorism, and other serious offences.
Silver Notices have been a decade in the making. INTERPOL's member countries resolved to introduce the notice in 2015, stating that the most effective means of combating crime "is the tracing, restraint, seizure, recovery and confiscation of proceeds and instrumentalities of crime in order to deprive criminals of their illicitly acquired gains".
Ten years later, INTERPOL has finally launched the Silver Notice, albeit in a pilot phase that will run until November 2025 involving 52 of INTERPOL's 196 member countries and territories. Participating countries include the UK, United States, China, Italy, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates.
In accordance with the 'legal framework' published by INTERPOL, Silver Notices may be published/circulated at the request of a National Central Bureau ("NCB") for one or more of the following purposes:
- to locate assets;
- to identify assets;
- to obtain information about assets;
- to monitor assets discreetly and/or continuously.
The requesting and sharing of this information are permitted for the purposes of both criminal and civil forfeiture. Silver Notices can be issued pre-conviction provided the Notice relates to a person who is subject to a criminal investigation relating to a serious crime punishable by at least four years' imprisonment. No minimum threshold amount is required.
Silver Notices will be limited to non-coercive measures, meaning that information obtained via a Silver Notice will typically be for the purpose of facilitating subsequent bilateral engagement, including requests for seizure, confiscation or recovery of assets.
INTERPOL has made clear that, before publication or circulation, its General Secretariat will carefully review each request for a Silver Notice to ensure that the request complies with its rules, including the prohibition on political misuse under Article 3 of the INTERPOL Constitution.
The pilot is being overseen by INTERPOL's Expert Working Group on Asset Tracing and Recovery, who are tasked with designing safeguards and assessing costs. The Expert Working Group will submit a report to INTERPOL's 93rd General Assembly (in late 2025) setting out the results of the pilot and any recommendations for the future. During the pilot phase, extracts of Silver Notices will not be published on INTERPOL's website.
The potential risk
Whilst Silver Notices may provide a promising mechanism for circumventing the slow and cumbersome mutual legal assistance ("MLA") procedures which might otherwise be necessary to obtain information about overseas assets, they are not without risk.
INTERPOL's history with Red Notices has demonstrated the ease with which such Notices can be misused. There have been many cases where Red Notices have been improperly sought, including to target political dissidents, human rights activists, and journalists under the guise of legitimate law enforcement.
Whilst INTERPOL has been able to identify and reject some of these cases, doing so relies on it maintaining robust oversight over requests made, and on legal practitioners to bring abusive requests to INTERPOL's attention, something which INTERPOL itself recognises is far from a 'perfect system'.
Against that backdrop, the Silver Notice provides yet another opportunity for similar misuse.
Having confirmed that each request will be reviewed by INTERPOL's General Secretariat, it is imperative that the INTERPOL and the Expert Working Group develop robust safeguards and transparent mechanisms to ensure compliance with its Constitution and to prevent Silver Notices from being abused.
More civil recovery?
The Silver Notice arrives at a time when UK enforcement agencies are becoming increasingly active in deploying civil asset recovery powers (just this month, for example, the Serious Fraud Office obtained its first ever Unexplained Wealth Order, signalling a possible new focus). As such, the Silver Notice has the potential to become a powerful tool, enabling UK authorities to expand existing civil recovery efforts beyond easily identifiable domestic assets.
That said, the effectiveness of Silver Notices will be measured in more than overseas recovery statistics. The success of the Silver Notice pilot will doubtless turn on INTERPOL's ability to monitor Silver Notice requests and reject those which do not comply with its Constitution.
See INTERPOL's Silver Notice Legal Framework document
here:
https://www.interpol.int/content/download/22463/file/SilverNotice_LegalFrameworkGoverning%20%28REV%29.pdf
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
