TARGETS OF OPPORTUNITY FOR MONEY LAUNDERERS AND FINANCIAL CRIMINALS

If you are former US military, with deployment experience abroad, you probably pay close attention to details of the small American combat units stationed in Syria, and the reports coming out of that theater. We note that Iran successfully used the fog of the mass shipment of post-disaster humanitarian aid to the Turkey-Syria region to piggyback in arms and ammunition, on board relief cargo flights, to be subsequently used against the US contingent there.

This method of operation is commonly used by money launderers and sundry other financial criminals engaged in covertly transferring funds into a specific area, when a national disaster, outbreak of disease, or some Act of God such as a hurricane or typhoon occurs, requiring a united response.Compliance officers at international banks in the affected region, where they are able to open at all, typically draft whoever is available into priority tasks, and compliance simply is not considered to be one of them.

Financial criminals, already adroit at shell company formation, often lateral over into the creation of bogus charitable organizations, using names deceptively similar to existing legitimate charities, or adopting names chosen deliberately to connote establishment organizations. They also appropriate the names of defunct charities, or insinuate themselves into small, poorly-run entities, to move dirty money with impunity.

Laundrymen can also become "donors," although their so-called donations are diverted en route, and never do each their officially-declared recipients. Diversion, during the chaos that exists immediately after a disaster, and before organized activity sets it, is their prime time to move bulk cash, or wire transfers, into the affected zone, and to whatever concealed destination they have in mind as end user.

Therefore, consider ALL national emergencies as a work in progress for enterprising financial criminals, and palette upon which they can designed, and build, a clever operation, right under the nose of the compliance division, whose staff are busy with other life-saving activities that week. Watch for this, please.