From the Assistant Director: The U.S. Secret Service Partners with State, Local, and International Law Enforcement to Pursue the World’s Most Wanted Cybercriminals

From the Director

Police Chief Magazine|Columns|From the Director|From the Assistant Director: The U.S. Secret Service Partners with State, Local, and International Law Enforcement to Pursue the World’s Most Wanted Cybercriminals

From the Assistant Director: The U.S. Secret Service Partners with State, Local, and International Law Enforcement to Pursue the World’s Most Wanted Cybercriminals

A.T. Smith, Assistant Director, Office of Investigations, U.S. Secret Service, Washington, D.C.

In April 14, 1865, five days after the formal end of the American Civil War President Abraham Lincoln met with Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch to combat the United States’ overwhelming counterfeit currency problem. The idea of creating the U.S. Secret Service was born the very day that Abraham Lincoln traveled to Ford’s Theater and was assassinated.

As one of the oldest federal investigative law enforcement agencies in the United States, the Secret Service was—and still is—mandated with the mission of suppressing counterfeiting and protecting America’s financial payment systems (among other duties including protection of the president, the vice president, and former elected leaders). Today, as the financial payment methods evolve, so does the Secret Service. In addition to its original mandate of combating the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, the passage of new legislation in 1984 gave the Secret Service authority for investigating credit card and debit card fraud and parallel authority with other federal law enforcement agencies in identity theft cases.