Silver Notices One Year On: INTERPOL’s Asset-Tracing Tool

Silver Notices One Year On

INTERPOL has published an update on its Silver Notice system, reporting that more than 200 active requests are now in circulation, seeking to trace a combined USD 2.2 billion in cash, real estate, yachts and even cattle across borders.

Readers of this blog will recall our earlier coverage of the Silver Notice, including the UK’s second-ever request in April 2025. The Silver Notice launched as a pilot in January 2025; 81 countries now participate, and they can send tracing requests to police in all 196 INTERPOL member countries.

It is the first new colour-coded notice INTERPOL has added in over twenty years – a genuinely interesting expansion of a system that has otherwise run for decades with Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Black, Orange and Purple Notices. Its purpose is narrow: identifying the proceeds of crime so that national authorities can move to freeze and recover them.

According to INTERPOL’s update, more than 2,500 responses have been shared between countries since launch – including from states not formally part of the pilot – and over USD 40 million in assets have already been traced or identified.

Italy has had the headline early successes. The Guardia di Finanza requested the very first Silver Notice in January 2025 in connection with a senior mafia figure, and the notice led to the identification of over USD 1.7 million in assets in Brazil, ranging from cash and real estate to vehicles and cattle. A separate Silver Notice from a European country, seeking to trace more than USD 18 million misappropriated by a former member of its National Asset Management Company, resulted in over a quarter of the funds being located by the Australian Federal Police within a month. And a request from India in May 2025, concerning a European civil servant suspected of selling fake Schengen visas and buying property in the Middle East with the proceeds, produced leads from Australia within five days.

INTERPOL’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre notes that the value of a Silver Notice often runs beyond a single case, with onward exchanges of information opening fresh lines of inquiry – particularly when a Silver Notice is paired with a Red Notice for the same individual.

The system remains in pilot phase. Requests are reviewed by the Notices and Diffusions Taskforce and must comply with Articles 2 and 3 of the INTERPOL Constitution. The Silver Notice appears to be doing what it was designed to do. With INTERPOL estimating that 99% of criminal assets globally go unrecovered, even modest gains in cross-border tracing are worth recording. One to watch as the pilot runs on.