Robodogs, digital forensics and ghost guns: inside Interpol's innovation lab

Irish Times

22-05-2025

A fleet of underwater drones, gleaming and ready for action, is lined up along the wall. Nearby, a small armoury of brightly coloured, 3D-printed guns is displayed on a side table. A robot dog, named Inno, lies prone on the floor, waiting to be activated.
In the leafy Singapore suburb of Tanglin, over the road from the British high commission and the US embassy, and a block away from the botanic gardens,
Interpol
's innovation centre is where law enforcement officers from around the world come to analyse the latest strategies of organised criminals and develop techniques for bringing them down.
One side of a global arms race is being waged here, as the international police organisation tries to stay ahead of its increasingly sophisticated and professionalised criminal adversaries.
For a decade this modest research facility, kitted out with technology at the forefront of policing, has been a mecca for forensic scientists. The centre is set within Interpol's large, fortified complex in Singapore, its second biggest office behind its headquarters in Lyon, France.
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The site also includes one of Interpol's three global command and co-ordination centres which, along with facilities in Lyon and Buenos Aires, provide 24-hour monitoring for police in nearly 200 countries. If a suspect on Interpol's most-wanted list crosses an international border, they will be flagged here. In 2024, 215 fugitives were caught this way. This year, Mohamed Amra, the gangster known as 'The Fly', who was named France's public enemy number one after
his escape
from custody left two prison guards dead last May, was arrested in Romania following an operation involving an international network of police.
The Singapore office is where Interpol studies a range of modern criminal activities, including cyber crime, digital piracy and counterfeit pharmaceuticals.
As in many industries, the business of crime has been profoundly affected by developments in
artificial intelligence
, upending the cat-and-mouse game played by the police and criminals. 'The changes in criminality we have seen over the last two to three years because of advances in technology are bigger than at any point in my career,' says Fabio Bruno, a bespectacled Italian, who started as a fraud investigator in the late 1990s and now runs Interpol's digital forensics team.
Bruno and his colleagues – Paulo Noronha, a Brazilian, and Abdulla al-Jalahma, from Bahrain – take me on a tour of the digital forensics lab. Here the team uses an array of gadgets, from chip readers to smartwatch testing tools, to disassemble digital devices before extracting and analysing their precious data.
Near the door sits a bulky suitcase, heavily padded with a dozen or so cartridges that resemble retro video games. These are readers for the infotainment systems of a variety of car models. Each cartridge can be hooked up to the mini computer that sits inside most modern cars and stores huge amounts of data on their movements. Vehicle digital forensics is one of the fastest-growing areas of criminal investigation.
'Sometimes if the suspect connects their phone to their car entertainment system, we can even access their messages and call history,' says Noronha with a mischievous grin.
The mobile phone has become arguably the most important piece of evidence for criminal investigators. It holds a wealth of information on communication, movement and search history, as well as personal media files. Criminals often try to break or discard their phones when they realise they are about to get caught. But even if the screen or the handset is damaged, the most valuable information is stored in a labyrinth of microchips. Half the Interpol lab is dedicated to workstations for extracting circuitry from broken phones and other devices, using digital microscopes and tiny precision tools.
Around a corner is a portable 'clean room', a glass box with an extractor to purify the air and keep out dust. The chips are highly sensitive to contamination.
Next to it is a thick metal door leading to a windowless office. This is a Faraday room, Jalahma explains, which blocks electromagnetic signals. It is here that investigators take phones that are off or dead and turn them back on for inspection.
'It is like an underground bunker,' says Jalahma. 'If you turn a phone on and it connects to a network, there is always the risk that someone will be able to connect to it and wipe it remotely. We cannot take that risk.'
A logo at Interpol's Global Complex for Innovation building in Singapore, which aims to strengthen global efforts to fight increasingly tech-savvy international criminals. Photograph: Roslan Rahman/AFP via Getty Images
The lab also features a range of 3D laser scanners: special cameras that capture a 360-degree impression of a crime scene. Set atop a 6ft tripod, the tall black dome head resembles a sleeker version of a surveying tool common on most building sites. During a 20-second rotation, its multiple sensors and cameras can map out a high-definition 3D image, limiting the chances of contamination.
'You can have fewer people walking around, adding their own footprints and potentially accidentally tampering with evidence,' says Bruno. Investigators can revisit the scene remotely with more accurate measurements of bullet trajectories or bloodstain patterns than by traditional methods. The virtual crime scene provides juries with a more immersive way to assess evidence.
The International Criminal Police Commission, as it was known, was founded in 1923 as a group of police forces from 20 countries. Interpol today counts 196 countries as members, a global organisation that unites the US, China, Russia, Ukraine and Iran. Just a handful of countries are not members, including North Korea, Kosovo and Taiwan.
More than 10,000 of Interpol's famous red notices – international alerts for wanted individuals – are issued every year. The first was for a Russian man accused of killing a police officer in 1947. Since then, Interpol has launched a rainbow of different notices: yellow for missing persons, black for unidentified bodies, silver for criminal assets.
Interpol encourages members to share investigative techniques, and it hosts centralised criminal record systems. One of its first priorities was cracking down on counterfeit currency, cheques and passports. It was through Interpol that fingerprint identification techniques, developed by Danish police, spread globally.
The organisation now hosts 19 separate databases, centralising more than 225 million police records on areas as diverse as travel and identity documents, firearms and stolen property. One tracks lost artwork, containing descriptions of cultural objects stolen from museums or looted from war zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Another logs incidents of maritime piracy. In total the databases were searched some 7.4 billion times in 2023.
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Sharing information between police forces is a key part of Interpol's mission. At the Singapore complex, a dedicated team of cyber crime experts from police forces around the world work together to assess emerging cyber threats and alert countries that are under attack. Working at desks in rows and facing a screen showing live data on cyber attacks, the team gathers and analyses information on one of the fastest-moving areas of organised crime.
The Singapore office was opened in 2015 to act as a global hub for tackling the emerging threat of cyber crime. As AI-enabled crime has risen to prominence, the team is now focused on deepfake romance scams, sextortion and multimillion-dollar phishing attacks.
'AI has completely changed the criminal's business model,' says Huanzhang Fu, a former policeman from China who leads the AI lab.
A decade ago, a widely attempted fraud was the 'Nigerian prince' scam, wherein a victim is emailed by supposed foreign royalty, with the promise of shared riches if they provide an upfront payment. Today's AI-enabled scams are far more sophisticated.
Large language models strip out telltale signs of a scam, such as spelling mistakes or syntax errors. Meanwhile, deepfake audio and video are used to provide 'proof' of the scammer's credentials. Southeast Asia is the global centre for romance-baiting scams, where fraudsters strike up phoney relationships with victims, convincing them to hand over ever-greater sums.
The day I visit, the cyber centre is monitoring close to 3.5 million attempted attacks – a fairly typical day, I'm told, with education institutions, telecommunication companies and government agencies the hardest hit.
The screens being analysed by the cyber specialists, on secondment from countries as diverse as Ukraine and Sri Lanka, show a particularly effective malware attack emanating from eastern Europe and targeting countries across north Africa and Asia.
Advances in AI have brought about a new age in the global arms race between police and criminals – one that Interpol is battling to stay ahead of.
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Dogs have aided law enforcement since at least the Middle Ages. The word 'sleuth' is derived from bloodhounds in 14th-century Scotland, known as 'slough dogs' for their ability to track miscreants through boggy ground.
The latest iteration of the police dog is the robotic K9, used to assess potentially dangerous scenes before entering. These robodogs, metallic and faceless with spindly legs, are packed with sensors to detect the presence of a range of hazards, from drugs and explosives to chemicals and radiation.
Interpol's Chinese-made model is roughly the size of a German shepherd. It lies dormant during my visit, but I'm told it can run at up to 12km an hour and jump more than a metre high. The dogs' ability to climb stairs, carry phones or medical supplies, and send and receive audio messages makes them handy in hostage negotiations.
Interpol's battles are also naval. Its collection of remote-controlled, blue submersible drones highlights the way criminals and police often use the same technology, in an escalating battle. Much like the flying drones gangs use to smuggle drugs and mobile phones over prison walls, their underwater cousins are used to transport contraband along rivers and out at sea.
From Brazil, drugs and weapons are transported overseas strapped to the hulls of ships. In this so-called parasite smuggling, cocaine traffickers hire skilled divers to attach torpedo-shaped, waterproof containers to cargo ships bound for European and Asian ports. The ships' crews may have no idea they are part of a global smuggling operation. Interpol's drones monitor for parasites at major ports.
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Another area where police are catching up with criminals is the proliferation of 3D-printed firearms. A type of 'ghost gun', the plastic weapons first appeared just over a decade ago.
The availability of 3D printers and print-to-order services online means criminals are finding it easier to manufacture bespoke firearms. Luigi Mangione, the suspect accused of shooting UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, was in possession of a pistol and silencer that police believe was 3D-printed. More than 27,000 ghost guns were seized by US police in 2023, up from 1,629 in 2017.
Despite their flimsy appearance, each one can sell for as much as $2,000 (€1,750) on the black market.
The replica gun parts on display at Interpol's lab are manufactured here to use in research into ghost guns' traceability. Unlike traditional firearms, which have serial numbers, it seems impossible to track the origin of a ghost gun. Researchers at the lab are working to link ghost guns to their specific printers, analysing distinctive production patterns.
But for every success, the researchers at Interpol are acutely aware that the game of one-upmanship will continue, Bruno says forlornly. 'They are clearly learning from us just like we are studying them.' – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025