Our Team
Mike Loughnane, President, CFE, CAMS
Mike is a former Director of Special Operations at the US Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Inspector General. As a U.S. Special Agent between the US Department of Transportation and EPA, he investigated a number of complex fraud allegations, including antitrust, contract fraud, grant fraud and public integrity. In the 1990’s while at EPA, Mike was tasked with developing a computer forensics program and cybercrime investigation capability and in 2003, he was promoted to senior management as Director of Special Operations, with national oversight in the cybercrime/forensic program as well as all employee integrity investigations.
Mike joined Booz Allen Hamilton in 2007 as a subject matter expert in IT security where he managed computer network security teams positioned at various U.S. government clients. In 2010 he was assigned as an instructor in counter threat finance at the US Department of Defense. In that role he led a team where they designed and delivered analytical and critical thinking training courses in counter threat finance and financial crime investigation methods to the US intelligence community, federal law enforcement, and the regulatory agencies.
Today, Mike continues to deliver training at conferences, customer-based programs of training and webinars to the international law enforcement and regulatory sector audience. He presents at conferences around the world with a mission to support law enforcement in their efforts against illicit financial networks.
Robert Bacon, Huxley Orion
Robert is a proven leader in training financial and counter terror investigations. With his experience in the NY National Guard, his training can address the interfacing and understanding between law enforcement agencies, military intelligence units, financial regulators, and financial institutions with regard to financial security operations, incident response and vulnerability management.
Living in his native Costa Rica, Robert has a in-depth understanding of Latin America and the Caribbean Threat Finance regulations, historical and emerging threats trends.
Clayton Byford
Clay is a true veteran in the counter-illicit finance community with twenty years of experience. He began his military service training as an intelligence analyst and an infantryman. Using training and the experience gained during two tours in Afghanistan, he has worked primarily with state police and county drug task force units. Clay was selected as a member of the inaugural class of Counter Threat Finance (CTF) analysts under the National Guard Bureau (NGB) Counterdrug program. In that role, he was based out of the Chicago HIDTA and supported investigations led by DEA, HSI, FBI, USSS, USPIS, Commerce Department, Illinois State Police, Cook County Sheriff’s office, and CPD and other local municipal police departments in the greater Chicago area. While in Chicago he also became the first power user of the now-popular Chainalysis cryptocurrency analysis tool and was asked to speak at an international conference on the topic.
Over his career, Clay has personally supported dozens of cases that reached billions of dollars moved through them, led financial assessments of corrupted foreign financial institutions, identified hundreds of professional money launderers, and analyzed millions of Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) records. He continues to serve as a financial data subject matter expert and data analyst in
the field, working at the national level to fight against global transnational organized crime.
Layla M. Hashemi, Ph.D.
Researcher and Data Analyst, Terrorism,
Transnational Crime, and Corruption Center
Dr. Hashemi is a research assistant at George Mason University’s Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC). Ms. Hashemi received her Ph.D. from George Mason University in Public Policy and her M.A. from New York University in International Relations and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Ms. Hashemi has worked for various organizations including Forum 2000 and The Journal of Civil Society. She is currently an adjunct professor of Political Science at Montgomery College where she teaches a variety of courses including Comparative Politics, International Conflict Resolution and a course she helped develop on Global Human Rights. Her current research focuses on illicit trade, human trafficking and corruption in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
Abi Waddell
Abi is an information security consultant and researcher, with an extensive background in data gathering, security testing, and threat assessment and investigations for multi-national corporations and non-profits. She has particular expertise in OSINT intelligence gathering, deviceless forensics and ethical hacking.
In 2019 she founded Inquiris which assists organizations to investigate and protect against criminal activity in the fields of environmental and wildlife crime, illicit trading and trafficking, missing persons, cultural property theft, fraud, terrorism and intellectual property infringements.
Additional recent research has focused on improving OSINT attack behavior detection, social media scraping and forensic techniques, and bypassing credential protection mechanisms in web applications.