RCIPS say drop in crime figures must not lead to complacency and FCU hunt for bank fraudster whose victims include police officers

Chief Supt. Walton of the Royal Cayman islands Police Service (RCIPS) said on Tuesday (2) in response to the Jan-Jun Statistics showing a big drop in crime,

“The drop in crime is certainly welcome news. However, this is no time to be complacent. In fact, we are constantly challenging ourselves about how we approach combating criminality in the Cayman Islands. We are well aware that Grand Cayman can be ‘deceptively quiet’ and as such we cannot afford to allow complacency to set in.”

On the complaint of the RCIPS being almost invisible he said, that they had taken steps to be more visible to the public.

“We have looked at the critical areas across the organization and focused on becoming better and built on this through various training initiatives,” he said. “We have placed investigative and operational emphasis on those crimes that have had the most significant impact on the Cayman Islands and tackled them with focused and targeted operations; thus resulting in a dramatic reduction in serious crimes such as robberies and murders.

“We recognize and appreciate the support shown to us from the entire Cayman community in assisting us to keep the Cayman Islands safe and to maintain the tranquility and peacefulness these Islands are known for”.

In a separate internal circular released by the RCIPS, officers from the Financial Crimes Unit (FCU) are conducting an investigation into the alleged misappropriation of mortgage commitment fees from the Scotia Bank and Trust Cayman Limited that has directly affected a number of police officers.

The FCU have revealed that as the investigation progressed into “complexities of this internal bank fraud”, investigators found that many of the potential victims of this fraud were police officers.

The police appear to be looking for a Lisa Archibold.

On CITN-News27’s Monday (1) evening news it was reported Scotiabank released the following statement regarding the investigation:

“We are taking this situation very seriously and our preliminary assessment indicates that no Scotiabank mortgages were affected by this incident,” the bank said. “We have notified the police and are working cooperatively with them during their investigation. We hold employees to extremely high standards and do not tolerate any actions that do not meet those standards – at the hint of wrongdoing we take swift and decisive action.”