North Wales Police see near 70% hike in ‘proceeds of crime’ cash seized from criminals

North Wales Police say they have significantly increased proceeds of crime seizures in the last financial year.

A percentage of the funds is returned to the force by the Home Office to help in the fight against crime.

North Wales Police are the top performing force in Wales in this area and during the last financial year the force received £106,850 in comparison to the previous year’s returns of £63,035 an increase of £43,815

The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 known as POCA sets out to recover the ‘Proceeds of Crime” and deals with a wide range of matters relevant to UK law on proceeds of crime issues.

These include confiscation orders against convicted individuals, civil recovery of proceeds of crime from unconvicted individuals, taxation of profits generated from crime and UK anti-money laundering legislation.d

TITAN ROCU, the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit which North Wales Police is part of, recently received £58,000 after an Aston Martin was sold at auction – it was seized from a North West based drugs gang who were involved in selling £4m of ‘legal highs’ online.

Detective Sergeant Haydn Williams from the North Wales Police Financial Investigation Unit said;

The figures show North Wales Police will actively pursue criminals and will use the powers under the Proceeds of Crime Act to strip criminals of any property, including their homes, cars and cash that they possess.

With the help of the public we can bring people to justice and recover their ill-gotten gains.

We must remember that many criminals are motivated by money and profit and that leaving illegal assets in the hands of criminals damages our local communities and society as a whole.

We won’t stand for that in north Wales and with the continued help of our communities we will robustly target those few who cause us the most harm.”

‘However we can’t tackle this problem alone and key to all our work is intelligence and I cannot emphasise enough the importance of the community sharing their concerns with us.

Information can be passed to Police via the web live chat http://www.north-wales.police.uk/contact/chat-support.aspx or phoning 101.

If you’d rather pass information anonymously then phone Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.’