D2.2: Set of use cases and scenarios

Title: TOOLS FOR ANTI MONEY LAUNDERING

Tools for Anti Money Laundering

One key component of the fight against money laundering is emerging in the development of models of who money launderers are and how they act. The objective is not only to detect those engaging in criminal activity - leading to the imprisonment of those individuals and/or the seizure of their assets - but also to prevent future occurrences of the crime.

The modelling usually encompasses the use of automated monitoring tools - powerful algorithms that sweep through the records stored in transaction databases looking for those patterns of financial behaviour that deviate from the norm. The transactions flagged by the monitoring software are then subject to scrutiny by a human agent (e.g., the employee of a bank or financial intelligence unit) in order to separate those transactions that are merely unusual for a specific customer from those that are, indeed, suspicious. The unusual behaviour only becomes a source for concern when there is no known legitimate source for the income or the observed lifestyle does not fit the one expected from someone with a specific legitimate economic activity: a sudden peak in a butcher’s bank account may be due to the sale of a house rather than the reward from some criminal activity, for instance. 

It is crucial for financial investigators and other anti-money laundering agents to command a holistic picture of the identity of each person flagged by the automated monitoring systems, as discussed in the next section.