Ten years after first raising the possibility of adding a ninth notice to INTERPOL’s existing eight series of colour-coded alerts at the 2015 INTERPOL General Assembly, INTERPOL announced its first ever silver notice on Friday 10 January 2025, in relation to assets linked to a senior member of the Italian mafia.
Though still in its pilot phase, the silver notice (“identification and tracing of criminal assets”) involves 52 of INTERPOL’s 196 member nations, and will allow all partner nations to request and share information regarding assets linked to criminal activities – including drug trafficking, laundering, corruption, among other offenses, and utilise that information to initiate strategies to arrange bilateral agreements or requests to seize, confiscate, or recover assets such as financial accounts, vehicles, properties and more, as subject to each nation’s laws. A total of 500 silver notice requests and diffusions will be made available for all partner countries.
INTERPOL has also stated that the General Secretariat will review each silver notice and diffusion to ensure it’s compliant with the organisation’s rules and policies, and to ensure it’s not being weaponised for political purposes. Silver notices will also not be published online during the pilot phase. The pilot phase will last until at least November 2025.
What Is It?
INTERPOL has historically published eight alerts:
- red (wanted person)
- yellow (missing persons)
- blue (additional info)
- black (unidentified bodies)
- green (warnings and intelligence)
- orange (imminent threat)
- purple (modus operandi)
Silver is now the ninth and focuses on using international cooperation between INTERPOL countries to identify, trace, and recover criminal asset.
Silver notices were first proposed in 2015, but failed to gain any momentum until the 91st General Assembly in Vienna in 2023, which established a working group to “assess various proposals devoted to the exchange of financial information and to the tracing and recovery of criminal assets, including the 2015 General Assembly resolution to create a new INTERPOL notice named Silver Notice”.
An official pilot phase was also endorsed, with feedback and recommendations for further improvements to be presented at the 2025 assembly in Morocco.
Key takeaways
The silver notice will make it easier for INTERPOL member countries to track and recover criminal assets, and will also improve the abilities of law enforcement agencies to combat financially-motivated crimes and combat cybercrime, corruption, and terrorism.