TRADE-BASED MONEY LAUNDERING AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

f you are responsible for suppressing Trade-Based Money Laundering at your financial institution, you most likely possess a basic working knowledge of the documents used in the international shipment of consumer goods, to aid you in your examination of payments transiting your bank, but there's something else that can make a difference in success or failure; what we call Cultural Literacy. That is the broad-based ability to understand, and participate fluently in your environment, occupation and culture, by having a liberal arts education, supplemented by specific knowledge in your chosen fields, international trade compliance, and AML/CFT. If you haven't acquired it, know that your TBML adversaries most certainly possess those skills.

Part of that required knowledge base is Political Geography, a generally academic subject that has become extremely relevant in 2024, due to major trade disruption, driven by both military, as well as environmental, causes. TBML laundrymen also have a university background, as you surely know, and they are combing any other geo-political possibilities that they can latch on to, other than Suez & Panama, to create a plausible scenario which will cover and conceal the placement of criminal proceeds within international trade payments, The know the other potential choke-points, and can fabricate issues, or remedies purportedly resorted to, which are not only credible, but which you will buy into, when you pass their transactions. They will seize upon other Middle Eastern or Asian maritime transit points which exist, and construct what look very much like legitimate shippers' responses, to deceive you.

Don't let it happen; be as current upon current shipping status as they are, and pierce their bogus constructs, exposing them for the TBML that they are. Knowledge is not only power, it is the solution.