AI ALLOWS MONEY LAUNDERERS TO FIND NEW ROADS

If there ever was a reason for compliance officers to jump feet first onto the Artificial Intelligence bandwagon, it is the adaption of AI-powered platforms by career money launderers to create new methods and techniques, to explore and exploit in places where they are not known to have gone before. While compliance is using AI as a shield, in both client onboarding and transaction monitoring, laundrymen will be employing it to expand their horizon into previously uncharted territory.

 Such actions must be taken as already a reality, given their long history of early use of emerging technology. Remember, law enforcement and the intelligence services have been using AI for some time, so you can expect that enterprising money launderers, who are extremely attentive to, reflexively respond in kind to new techniques employed by their government opponents. In short, they adopt law enforcement techniques as their own, as a matter of survival, to avoid detection and arrest.

While the different ways in which launderers can use AI, two specific subjects come immediately to mind:

(1) The penetration of new types of legitimate industries, going where they have never been before, to piggyback on them like parasites, employing them to move and clean the proceeds of crime. AI inquiries can reveal the little-known "tricks of the trade," characteristics of a specific industry or field that can be exploited to move dirty money. Such facts, which are known only to insiders in that type of business, can provide a loophole which laundrymen can drive their operation into, and through, successfully. Both law enforcement and the compliance community will be blissfully aware of the use of those types of businesses or industries.

(2) The use of obscure and generally unknown facilities and jurisdictions abroad which can be accessed with a high degree of  success, as nobody has tumbled to them in the past. Opaque tax haven, bearer share or confidentiality provisions hidden in otherwise stable places, or newly-emerging possibilities that have recently appeared, and are not known. Look for AI to find new jurisdictions abroad to operate in, as its information-seeking ability will find "opportunities" for criminal conduct in new places.

Therefore, inasmuch as you must assume that laundrymen are hard at work breaking new ground, and assuming that you are not already where they are, it is required that expanding the compliance horizon with Artificial Intelligence, so that you can not only recognize new trends, but can suppress them in real-time. To do any less places you behind the eight ball, which will probably be considered, sooner or later, as compliance malpractice. Find those new roads before the money launderers use them against you, please.