TO CATCH A MONEY LAUNDERER IN THE ACT, SEND A FORMER LAUNDRYMAN TO DO IT

It was shortly after 9/11; late one night, I received a call from a lawyer whom I had done a number of joint AML compliance lectures with. He was scheduled to give a lecture the next morning at a conference on Miami Beach, on MONEY LAUNDERING THROUGH HEDGE FUNDS, but his firm had just ordered him to immediately fly to Buenos Aires on a priority mission for a major Argentinian bank. He asked me if I was available to conduct the presentation in his place, as he knew that I was familiar with the subject, and didn't need any material from him.

After I gave the lecture, the CFO and the Director of Compliance at a billion dollar investment firm came up to see me. They had a $15m investment from a new foreign client pending, and the firm's owner wanted a second opinion from someone like myself, who has the unique perspective of having been a career laundryman, and could bring a different skill set to an enhanced due diligence investigation. The firm's lawyers had passed the client, who owned several television stations.

When conducting enhanced due diligence, you want to find your target at an unguarded moment, when he thinks nobody is looking, and where his actions might betray conduct making him an unacceptable risk. I found a photograph of the target, at the private aviation section of a major airport, waiting for someone to come down the steps to meet him; that person was one of Russia's most prominent oligarchs, and the target his front man and money launderer.

I found the client to represent an unacceptable risk, and his investment request was declined. I would go on to be hired by the company to review all its major new clients, and used my laundryman skills to ferret out the money launderers among them, which is a story that I will tell at the upcoming January 20 virtual seminar presented by TALENT IN THE CLOUD, in which you can learn about advanced, esoteric, obscure and exotic money laundering techniques that I have employed, encountered or exposed, as a laundryman, or as a Financial Crime Consultant, during the past 40 years. For details: https://titc.io/kenneth-rijock-the-laundry-man

By the way, that foreign "investor" (read money launderer), whom I exposed during enhanced due diligence, then followed the money launderer's playbook, of attempting a different approach when unable to place his client's criminal proceeds, by later seeking to place the money through the firm's Bermuda subsidiary, which had a different compliance division. To find out what happened then, and how I dealt with it, come to the seminar.