Example
- Southland and Eastland are neighbouring countries
- Southland Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) has adding to its database for several years. Now it has over 5000 records about Money Service Providers - their names, addresses, emails, telephone numbers, bank accounts. Data protection prevents the Southland FIU sharing the database with Eastland.
- Eastland police are investigating a drugs trafficking network. They have intelligence that drug traffickers use unknown financial professionals in Southland to launder their funds. The Eastland Police have collected a large amount of data from their investigations, with a total of about 1000 names, phone numbers, email addresses and account numbers. However, legislation prevents Eastland police from sharing their database with other domestic agencies or with Southland.
- Both Southland FIU and Eastland Police use goTrace and agree to use it to compare their data.
- An Eastland Police analyst transforms their chosen dataset. The Eastland analyst comes to the Southland FIU and brings the CD with the transformed data saved as "Hash List - Eastland". The FIU transforms its data and creates its own "Hash List - Southland FIU". Both lists contain names, telephone numbers, email addresses and account numbers.
- Southland FIU compares the two sets of transformed records. It finds 17 matches. Southland FIU sends the numbers of matched records back to Eastland Police and requests further details on the matched data.
- Eastland Police checks the received list. It turns out that Southland FIU has some information about certain suspects, whose contact details have been found in mobile phones seized from drug traffickers, and whose email addresses have been found in seized computers. Also, one account number appeared in paperwork found during one of the searches.
- Eastland Police then uses existing information sharing frameworks to send the detailed inquiries to Southland. This may include requests made through the Eastland FIU over the Egmont Group Network, going through Interpol, or using the mutual legal assistance mechanism.