If we look out 5-10 years, what is going to be more important to the next generation. Is it their digital life or their physical life? In this “Live from Links” episode, Patrick Ghion, Chief Cyber Strategy Officer for the Geneva Cantonal Police and an active member of the INTERPOL Metaverse Expert Group provides his answer to Jim Lee (Global Head of Capacity Building, Chainalysis), who spent almost 30 years with IRS Criminal Investigation team.
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Public Key Episode 165: Geneva Police Embrace Metaverse and Public-Private Partnerships
If we look out 5-10 years, what is going to be more important to the next generation. Is it their digital life or their physical life?
In this “Live from Links” episode, Patrick Ghion, Chief Cyber Strategy Officer for the Geneva Cantonal Police and an active member of the INTERPOL Metaverse Expert Group provides his answer to Jim Lee (Global Head of Capacity Building, Chainalysis), who spent almost 30 years with IRS Criminal Investigation team.
The duo discusses the complexities of law enforcement’s evolving landscape in the digital age and the critical role of public-private partnerships and academia in combating cybercrime.
Patrick provides context around the creation of regional Cyber Competence Centers (RC3) and the progress law enforcement is making in the metaverse, while encouraging police departments to strategize for future threats, training, and the integration of AI.
Quote of the episode
” Five, seven years from now, the question is, what is more important for you? Is it your digital life or your physical life and the outcome of this study is that for this generation, they will be adults in 10 years. The digital life is more important than the physical” – Patrick Ghion (Chief Cyber Strategy Officer, Geneva Cantonal Police)
Minute-by-minute episode breakdown
2 | Patrick’s career progression and intro to Regional Cyber Competence Center (RC3)
5 | Metaverse policing strategy and approach to “Vision 2030”
7 | Societal shift to report cybercrimes to police in the metaverse than in real life
11 | Public-Private and Academic Partnerships
15 | Hiring strategy for law enforcement for crypto and AI
19 | Reflections on Links Conference and networking
Related resources
Check out more resources provided by Chainalysis that perfectly complement this episode of the Public Key.
- Chainalysis In Action: How Chainalysis Helped the FBI Track Down and Freeze Millions in the Caesars Casino Ransomware Attack
- Blog: AI-Powered Crypto Scams: How Artificial Intelligence is Being Used for Fraud
- YouTube: Chainalysis YouTube page
- Twitter: Chainalysis Twitter: Building trust in blockchain
Speakers on today’s episode
- Jim Lee *host* (Global Head of Capacity Building, Chainalysis)
- Patrick Ghion (Chief Cyber Strategy Officer, Geneva Cantonal Police)
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Transcript
Jim
Too. So Patrick, it’s great that you’re here in New York at links, 2025 coming all the way from Geneva. I love sitting down with like minded law enforcement folks as a career law enforcement officer myself, and for those that listen to this podcast that might not be familiar with the Geneva Police Department. Can you just introduce yourself and give us a little bit about your department? Great
Patrick G.
pleasure, of course. Thank you very much for having me. First of all, it’s a great opportunity to come over here and confront ideas, meet many very inspiring people. And yeah, Geneva police is so in Switzerland, the French part, French speaking part of Switzerland. My background is I worked, first of all, five years in Swiss banks. Then I worked a couple of time in Asia. And in 1997 I started the police academy in Geneva for criminal police. So I started my career there. It’s almost 28 years now, and well, I started in some, let’s say, regular divisions like narcotics or burglary department, for example. And in 2003 they built the first cyber crime department, as we call it, and I joined at this point the cyber crime department 2003 I worked there for 10 years, and then I became the chief of this department. In 2015 I joined the management board of criminal police for eight years, and interestingly, in 2023 I got this position that doesn’t exist in the system. It’s chief cyber strategy officer. I report directly to the commander in chief. And my aim here is to try to forward think the 510, upcoming years to what we should have in mind to develop so that we can get up to the
Jim
point. Yeah, nice, actually, yeah. Vision from senior leadership goes a long way, you know, for those that are actually putting their hands on the work, so it’s good that you’re thinking that forward. Good look. You You were you implemented and were head of the regional cyber Competence Center for Western Switzerland. Can you just explain what was the gap? I think you refer to that as the RC three. Can you just explain what the gap that that center was trying to solve and what was its main mandate when you implemented
Patrick G.
that? So the regional cyber Competence Center three for Western Switzerland is comes from the National Strategy for combating cyber crime in Switzerland. So it comes from the national strategy. And the idea behind this is Switzerland, small country, 26 cantons, 26 police. It doesn’t make sense that each Police Department invests in the whole spectrum for combating cybercrime. The idea here is to put together infrastructure, competences, knowledge, tools, obviously, for the benefit of a whole and this is why you created this competent center based in Geneva, working for all Western Switzerland. That means the French speaking part of Switzerland, and we do some specific investigations or technical analysis for those French speaking part of Switzerland. And I think this is a very important idea that we need to put our forces together to grow and not that everyone doing the same thing with all the money and the resources that is needed for this. Yeah,
Jim
it’s very, it sounds very similar to what you know, we build a center of excellence here to do very similar things, you know, in the US, very similar, you know, two different parts of the world, but very similar ideas you mentioned in 2320 23 you took on a new position as the chief cyber strategy officer. Can you just talk a little bit about that role? And what does that role focus on?
Patrick G.
So the as I said, the role is more than forward thinking for what’s upcoming in the years. And this is based on the vision 2030, plus of Geneva police, which the command in chief announced to the press a couple of years ago now, and this vision 2030, plus assesses some aspect of the future, like, how will we treat or be at the service to our senior population? Another thing is mobility. What will be the future of mobility at. Enormous cars, drones and so on. And one of the aspect is the metaverse. So I’m focusing here in the vision 2030, plus in the metaverse aspect. And the idea here is to see what will these virtual world evolve, and how would we manage this? So we build a strategy in three points. The first one is training police training. How will we get advantage of these virtual benefits in training police officers in the future? Meaning, how would we get the positive aspect of this in making situation that we couldn’t train in real life too dangerous or too complex to put in place? I refer to this as well as in the medical sector, where you have more and more capabilities to train surgeons and other type of specific medicines in virtual world. The second aspect is prevention, and this is obviously something very important that we assess. Now globally, we need to fight cyber crime, find cyber criminals, but also inform the population and make the global awareness of the population getting higher regarding cyber crime. In this we have a project which is called metapon. We have an alliance with a university in nuchael in Switzerland, and a university in trovid, in Canada to work on several aspects. So Canada is working on more forensics aspects on the metaverse. The University of Nutella is working on the legal aspect for these new territories, if we can say so. And I’m working. We are working in Geneva for the policing in the metaverse. So there were a couple of studies who are very interesting on how the population could evolve in this kind of universes. The first one is the World Economic Forum in 2022 made a study saying that in 2026 25% of the world population would spend one hour in the metaverse per day. So it won’t be me. I’m too old for this, but this is probably something aiming to another very interesting study is about the younger generations the five seven years from now. The question is, what is more important for you? Is it your digital life or your physical life? And the outcome of this study is that for these generations that will be adults in 10 years, the digital life is more important than the physical life. So this is why we’re aiming to what we call the digital twin. So as we think that the population will evolve with the trend to need a different kind of relationship with the government, with police. Obviously, we want to build a police office in the metaverse, but of course, you cannot do this in every metaverse. You have several metaverses, regulated, unregulated, private, public Metaverse, and we don’t have the jurisdiction to go in some Metaverse and say we are the police here. So as I’m also part of the Interpol Metaverse expert group, the idea is to take what we learned there as Interpol build their own metaverse. So their headquarters, based in Lyon, are built in the metaverse, a private metaverse. So the idea here is to build a similar so Geneva police station in the metaverse to build some some bindings with the population. We have a wonderful museum, police Museum in the main building. The problem is this museum is behind security, so nobody sees this museum, and people working there don’t see it anyway, because they pass through every day. So this would be a module, and the idea is to build some modules in the metaverse to make the combination with the population prevention, making some kind of events also for the population. And the final idea here is to give the opportunity for these victims, maybe to make a complaint in the metaverse. Many people came to me. Saying that if they were a victim in the metaverse, they would prefer to go to the police and make a complaint in the metaverse rather than going on a real police office. And here’s another study which is very interesting. It’s more in the medical sector. It’s about the question is, would you prefer to go to a doctor to tell you problems, or would you prefer to go to systems, AI to explain what you have? And the outcome of this that is very interesting, people would prefer to go to system rather than to doctors to express their problems, because of the fear of judgment, and I can easily make the parallel between victims. How many victims don’t come to the police because they fear the judgment of the police officer. So the idea here is not to replace police officers, but it’s to give an alternative to these upcoming generations who will need, probably another interface with the government and the police.
Jim
What’s it’s so good that you’re so forward leaning from a vision perspective. And there are a couple interesting points there that you make. I could, you know, when you talk about Metaverse and medical procedures and education and training, you could really envision how in the metaverse you could train officers during enforcement operations is almost a practice area where they could make mistakes and learn from it, and it might be even more cost effective, as opposed to trying to bring everybody and have everybody travel into one area. You could do it in the metaverse. Lot of interesting, interesting points there. And I think you know, some of the younger kids and the younger generation, according to the studies that you mentioned, I mean, if they are going to spend an hour a day in the metaverse and the year 2026 that might be how they want to be educated. So it’s good that police forces are forward thinking and forward leaning in that space. You mentioned something else about partnering with academia, and when you say that, I automatically think of public, private partnerships. And obviously you’re a senior official, your senior leader there, within the Geneva Police Department. And I’m curious. So when you think about public private partnerships between police and industry, what other types of public private partnerships are you involved in, or do you want to be involved in to continue with that success with industry. Now, are there any others that you’re thinking of? Yeah,
Patrick G.
the thing is, the I think the world is becoming more and more complex, too complex to be able to be handled by police officers who do some upcoming training to be able to address these complex problems, because at a certain point, there are some it’s a job. It’s a specific job, if you say so in English, I’m not sure it’s you have to learn it, to practice this to be efficient. And you cannot be efficient in 10 or 20 jobs. You have to do one or two. So the idea here is to partnership police with private sector. Obviously, this is something that we are more and more focusing on, because we won’t be able to train police officers at the level that the private sector can give us the value in investigations. But when I talk about public private partnerships, it’s not just buying tools. It’s really trying to find a way to bind and think forward what would be the future of the problem we assess or we try to address, but also the relationship, and this is something which is very important to us, is to bind this relationship forward thinking. And then also everybody talks about PPP, so public, private partnerships, but I always put an A for academics, as you said. And because the universities, some technical schools, engineering, they are so important because they work on certain subjects, forward thinking. And we could absolutely benefit from these studies and this partnership. So we work with several university I go to university to speech, to the students to speak. To the students, also, I review some of their master’s degree or bachelor’s degrees exams, and we work together. So as I said, the university ELC in chattel, or the University of Quebec, polivier in Canada. But of course, in Geneva as well, in Lausanne, we have a very famous E coli science criminal where we try to more and more partnership with to benefit from this academic part of the partnership. And then we open to any partnership. We also even partnership with other police departments in Europe, trying to the US the Asia as well. It’s a sign partnership. So we open to sign a partnership. So the commander in chief is open to that, but with very it’s more like to benefit each other of what we can exchange so we don’t have again. And this is the same spirit of the regional cyber Competence Center that so that we don’t develop everything so many times. And if we can benefit from each other, it’s much better. It’s always
Jim
it always makes it a plus. Let me shift, shift gears here real quick, we’re seeing regulation in digital assets pick up with mica, heavy discussions in the US, and even digital asset focused regulators in Dubai. And regulatory frameworks in Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, from your perspective, do the regulations align with law either your departments or law enforcement in general, however you want to address that, does it align with goals and combating crimes involving crypto?
Patrick G.
Yeah, the idea here is we always aim to the main objective, but then we have regulatory frameworks that sometimes don’t allow us to work together and to exchange information. And the exchange of information is something very critical at police based in Geneva or Switzerland, but we don’t have the possibility to exchange information the way would be the most efficient for the case or for combating criminals. So whatever the regulations or the the aim is, I think that the future will be more in. How could we adapt the regulations and the legal framework to exchange more and more information to be more effective and more quick?
Jim
You, um, you’ve talked about a lot of forward leaning things. And, you know, we’ve talked about the younger generation. We’ve talked about the metaverse and how they learn and how we train and educate them. I’m curious. Let’s, let’s talk about people for a second, and and expertise and hiring, and how you and how you think about hiring the right personnel that fits in with a lot of this vision and forward leaning that you’re doing when I think about crypto, things change very fast. In the metaverse, things are changing really fast, and different jurisdictions are ahead of others. How do you think about hiring young officers that have to deal with all of this? Is there a strategy that the department? Are there any best practices? I know I struggled with it as a senior leader, and we’re constantly trying to hire the best people, but I’m curious, from your perspective, how do you think about
Patrick G.
it? Yes, this is definitely a challenge we face since a couple of years already, and it becomes more and more difficult to find the right people at police to fit these very specific roles in combating cybercrime. But we need police officers, so this is very important. And so I see two aspects. First of all, we need police officers. So we need to find and hire future police officers with a digital or cyber background that we could then use for these tasks. But at the same time, as I said before, the world is becoming more and more complex, and becomes difficult to have an expertise in everything. So we are more and more looking in subject matter experts that could join police force to be. Be better, quicker in investigations. So we have a strategy to have a mix with police and civil personnel that we hire to work together. And this is the case we had with the Combating crypto, cryptocurrency, or blockchain, or this, this field we hired last year two highly qualified civil personnel who work with the police in cases, in criminal cases. And the strategy we have for now it’s till 2027 to have other field of development, not only crypto, but also maybe some, some AI stuff, some deep fakes, how to address deep fakes and this kind of stuff. So we have a strategy on hiring civil personnel every year till 2027, and hopefully after that as well, to to be more efficient and to really have an expertise in these domains.
Jim
That’s good. Yeah, you know, we’re here at links. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s early in the conference. I know you’ve been here. I’m curious, from your perspective, for one of the, one of the first times here in New York, we have a lot of international partners here. And from your perspective, you’ve listened a lot of the sessions that are ongoing. And I’m curious, has anything caught your eye early in the conference, or anything that’s interested you most that’s come up during the sessions that you’ve listened to?
Patrick G.
In general, the conference is amazing, and I listened to all these very high professionals sharing. And this is what is so important in these kinds of events, that you meet people and you have time to exchange what you wouldn’t have if you do this online, obviously, and the what I got now, I have plenty of business cards in my wallet now, and I try to write to everyone, because it gives you so many inspiring ideas to work forward now, and it helps a lot to build a strategy with this. So you had those people explaining their cases, how police officers come and share what they did. In some specific cases, you have these small private sector who explain what’s the vision of the private sector for some aspect, and this is crucial, I think, for police to have this partnership with the private sector, who can sometimes give you ideas, because private sector have has a more global overview on what’s going on in the world, and so this, obviously in Geneva, we can benefit from it. So it’s very important.
Jim
I agree 100% and during my session, I challenged the audience to make sure that they they spoke to 10 new people that they didn’t know. I’m gonna put you on the spot. And did you? Did you meet? Did you make that meet that challenge yet and meet 10 new people that, oh,
Patrick G.
I met more than 10 people. Now that’s the way coming here for the recording, I met two other people and just quickly changed business cards. And because people are interested in knowing more what we’re thinking in Geneva about Metaverse, specifically in this case, but we are very interested in how people their vision and to confront the ideas, to know what others are thinking. And this is totally met the 10 people.
Jim
No, that’s that’s good to hear. Yeah, I’ve always thought myself that when you interact with people, you know, in a face to face setting, it’s human nature that you’re going to be more willing to help them out. You know, when you need something, and it just gets back to that theme of partnerships, whether it’s, you know, public, private partnership or a public, public partnership, law enforcement, as you know, in general, will be more willing to help out right now. You know, with a sense of urgency when you call when you have that opportunity to enter interact with people, and we are all fascinated by how, you know, there’s different best practices, you know, around the globe when it comes to policing. So really appreciate you being Thank
Patrick G.
you very much. Thank you. It’s a pleasure, and thank you again for the opportunity..
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