PERMUTATIONS AND COMBINATIONS: THE SOUL OF ADVANCED MONEY LAUNDERING TECHNIQUES

For those readers who remember these mathematical terms from their days at university, I use them to explain tradecraft. Many advanced money laundering methods are created by laundrymen, not out of their fertile imaginations, but by starting out with a known technique, which they are familiar with, and altering, modifying,updating or disguising it so that not only will it be unrecognizable to compliance officers peering at it in transaction monitoring, as too opaque to fathom, but so its critical function of placement without exposure will proceed with impunity.

In plain English, laundrymen twist a technique in some major way so as to change some of all of its elements; We see this regularly in the dark world of Trade-Based Money Laundering (TDML); the laundrymen take the traditional model, which consists of hiding criminal proceeds within complex legitimate international trade payments, and literally turn it inside out, such as actually sending extremely high-value goods shown as low-cost goods, and unloading them at their foreign destination, or billing one actual shipment several times, through a number of unaffiliated banks in different cities, permitting multiple payments for the same shipment. Some laundrymen constantly scheme at creating alternative techniques for each payment. Call it "Confusion to the Enemy."

Such modifications are themselves then altered in some critical way, and the results successfully employed in yet another series of transactions. therefore, compliance officers must not only be familiar with all the known advanced techniques in sure in 2024, and always keep an open mind about transactions which seem to suggest something unconventional, but appear to be legitimate, because those might very well be modified methods attempting to pass in front of your very eyes as clean.