UTICA, N.Y. — Utica College is providing its students training in financial crimes and money-laundering investigations through a partnership with Menlo Park, California–based CipherTrace, a cryptocurrency-intelligence company. Through the college’s partnership, undergraduate and graduate students had the opportunity to enroll in an eight-hour training course to become a CipherTrace certified examiner (CTCE), an industry-recognized designation. […]
UTICA, N.Y. — Utica College is providing its students training in financial crimes and money-laundering investigations through a partnership with Menlo Park, California–based CipherTrace, a cryptocurrency-intelligence company.
Through the college’s partnership, undergraduate and graduate students had the opportunity to enroll in an eight-hour training course to become a CipherTrace certified examiner (CTCE), an industry-recognized designation.
Utica College is “only the second” U.S. college or university invited to participate in CipherTrace Defenders League, a program that trains cryptocurrency analysts from colleges and universities around the world to trace funds lost through cryptocurrency fraud and theft, the college said in a news release.
“Once students have completed the training, they were able to work on a live, actual CipherTrace case to locate cryptocurrency assets that may have been stolen. CipherTrace receives many requests from individual victims of scams and other fraudulent activity to try to recover the funds,” Stephanie Nesbitt, dean of Utica College’s School of Business and Justice Studies, said. “The students, once certified, are responsible for completing their investigations, supervised and verified by CipherTrace, and writing the case report.”
She continued, “Our first student to complete the training and pass the certification exam was a female graduate cyber student. This is notable given that cyber and financial crime professions and academic programs remain predominantly male.”
Pamela Clegg, director of financial investigations and education at CipherTrace, said the firm chose to work with Utica College because of the college’s reputation for having “an outstanding financial crime studies program.” She added, “The school is renowned for providing anti-money laundering and financial crime talent to the world’s financial capital, New York City, and look forward to incorporating students from Utica’s cybersecurity program, as well.”
Suzanne Lynch, professor of practice in economic crime, arranged for two CipherTrace sessions at the college this past fall, as well as a series of dedicated two- and three-hour training sessions. So far, more than 70 cybersecurity and economic crime-students have completed the training, Lynch said.
Lynch has “extensive” experience in risk analysis, fraud-control implementation, and investigations in the financial services industry. Formerly VP for security and risk management at MasterCard Worldwide, she has held fraud-management positions at Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and Comerica Bank. At MasterCard, one of her many responsibilities included conducting fraud-operations reviews on banks to determine the levels of existing fraud controls, global fraud investigations, and third-party processing system-risk controls.
The college’s fraud and financial-crime investigation program, formerly known as economic crime, “was the first of its kind in the country,” Utica College noted.