Serious Fraud Office uses artificial intelligence to crack real crimes

The Serious Fraud Office is a specialist prosecuting authority tackling the top level of serious or complex fraud, bribery, and corruption across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It both investigates and prosecutes its cases, which is unique but necessary because the cases are complicated, and lawyers and investigators need to work together from the outset of them. Supporting both lawyers and investigators is an IT infrastructure that is managed by chief technology officer (CTO) Ben Denison, who also looks after the technology that supports the SFO's operational activities. "That includes digital evidence, so in our cases when we're investigating someone we'll see information from phones, tablets, laptops, and email, and we have a digital forensics team that processes that material and extracts relevant data from it, and it can then be ingested into another system which our case teams use to review it from," Denison tells PublicTechnology. In essence, the SFO ensures that all of the data – whether it's digital or a hard copy – is put into one place, so that it can be reviewed together.