Once the hard part of dealing with INTERPOL is over, and an individual’s Red Notice is removed, many difficulties that come with a Red Notice become obsolete. Though this is true, occasionally there are remaining challenges, particularly if the notice had to do with a criminal allegation of a financial crime. 

After INTERPOL deletes a Red Notice, whether due to it being politically motivated or otherwise improperly requested, INTERPOL’s member countries are notified of the deletion. This should be reflected in each country’s records, but this is not always the case. Sometimes domestic records are not updated properly, leading to falsehoods regarding previous Red Notice subjects. Such inaccurate information can cause problems in other areas as well.

For example, banks and financial intitutions utilize a variety of companies that provide personal data lists of those who are politically exposed, wanted for financial crimes, or listed by governmental agencies as prohibited business partners. If a country holds outdated information on a previous Red Notice subject, financial agencies such as those mentioned below are more likely to treat the individual as an active Red Notice subject.

As stated in a previous post detailing this topic, the companies that provide personal data lists, such as World-Check, LexisNexis, Bureau Van Dijk, and Dow Jones may obtain their data from media sources without independently checking the accuracy of the source’s reporting. Estlund Law had a client whose data was reported by such a company as having an open criminal case years after the case was completely dropped by the authorities. This client’s data was listed and circulated to every company that subscribes to this service, and the data was incorrect and outdated. Fortunately, these cases are rare, but they do occur.

Once these companies are made aware of their inaccuracies they should either remove or modify the information to be correct. 

Our next post will detail the residual effects of Red Notices in terms of government and police databases. 

As always, thoughts and comments are welcomed.