SEEKING TO VERIFY THAT YOUR TARGET IS AN ACTIVE MONEY LAUNDERER ? HERE'S WHY AN INTERNET SEARCH WON'T HELP YOU

 

If you are a compliance officer at an international bank, following up on some suspicious transactions you discovered, involving a professional (attorney, accountant, financial service provider), don't bother conducting an Internet search for any negative information on Google or other search engine. If it exists, it has cunningly been buried behind page after page of websites, usually constructed by an Internet reputation restoration technician. This individual has cleverly thrown a wide variety of Internet fluff, from many different places of origin, depicting your target multiple times as an honest, experienced professional, whose services are available to the legitimate public, extolling his qualifications, experience, charitable and public service achievements, and every type of Internet entry you can imagine. 

All this Web garbage, which invariably fills several pages, serves to convince even the most diligent inquirer that his target is clean & legitimate. It serves to push any news of a negative nature, such as an arrest for money laundering or other financial crime abroad, way, way back, where most people, thinking that page 10 or 30 cannot contain relevant entries, never venture into. Therefore, they give their target a clean bill of health, and their suspicions remain only questions, not supported by information that might require an enhanced due diligence inquiry, where the truth might just come out.

I am making this point because recently, I checked on a number of individuals, who have never been arrested, but are strongly suspected by yours truly of moving the proceeds of crime through the global financial structure. All of them had obviously used the services of some reputation restoration service to pollute the Internet with many, many entries, all of which were designed to insure that whatever negative information existed, it was deeply buried behind the huge volume of websites created solely for the purpose of creating a bogus Internet presence that told the reader their target was a legitimate, and thoroughly boring, individual, not that he was, in truth and in fact, a prolific money launderer. 

 The truth has been  pushed way back, where you won't see it, unless you have the rare habit of reading web search entries to the bitter end. Perhaps you might want to read your Internet search results backwards, from the least relevant; you might be surprised at what you find.