News reports about criminals using mule accounts to move/wash money

NIMAN

I've been hearing various reports recently about some folk getting caught for letting their accounts be used by criminals as a conduit to syphon money between accounts.

Something always puzzled me about this.

If criminals are transferring money from Account A to Account C, via mule account B, and the authorities are able to identify, through whatever means, that B was being used as a middleman, then how come the same systems aren't able to identify accounts A & C, and go after them?

coylemj

Account A is the innocent victim of the scam. Account C was opened with false ID and once the money arrives into the account from the money mule, it is withdrawn very quickly from multiple ATMs and the bank never hears from the account holder again.

piplip87

As above account A is the victim of the scam, they usually report the scam after getting scammed or the bank flags the transaction once it leaves account B.

Often Account B will send it to a fake account, an account in another jurisdiction or what we have seen lately is to a crypto wallet.

Unfortunately once the funds leaves the mules account it very hard to trace as account C has multiple layers of fake accounts, oversea accounts or crypto wallets to make their identity.

BagofWeed

Apstoliceeric1 might be able to show ye the ropes about money laundering. Check yer inboxes as he may have been kind enough to message some of ye.

God bless and go in the name of the lord.

lol.

NIMAN

@coylemj @piplip87

Are we talking about the same thing?

You are talking about a scam, whereas I am talking about someone who is contacted on Social Media by criminals, asked to accept a sum of money into their bank account, hold it for a while before transferring it on to a 3rd account.

They are offered a fee for letting their bank account be used for a temporary repository.

The report this morning said that many students are targeted as they are enticed by the thought of an easy couple of hundred euro for doing nothing. They are not losing any of their own money.

coylemj

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121086255#Comment_121086255

Yes, we are talking about different links in the same chain. You are viewing the money mule leg in isolation but it always starts with a scam whereby someone is tricked into giving away their bank details. The scammer then needs somewhere to send the money but moving it straight away to a foreign bank account could be difficult without having some groundwork done beforehand. The money mule account provides a staging place for the money before it gets moved to it's final destination.

Transferring money from the victim's account to the money mule's account typically wont raise any red flags because it is a transfer between Irish bank accounts. So it would look no different to a parent transferring money to a child for a deposit on an apartment. The money mule's account will already be prepped to transmit money to one or more foreign bank accounts. And they have probably already transferred smaller amounts through the account so that when the victim's money is moved, it won't be the first foreign transfer from that account. So once the money arrives in the money mule's account, it can be quickly moved out of the country.

Jim2007

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058312779/news-reports-about-criminals-using-mule-accounts-to-move-wash-money

Because it is never that simple and there are privacy laws and GDPR in between, plus the costs, time and effort in doing so. I'm going to make limited comments on this subject because I'm resident in Switzerland and as a former bank official I could find myself subject to Swiss criminal law for disclosing such matters.

To start with it is frightening to sit at a console in bank's data center and see the wave after wave of hacking attacks come in minute after minute. There are literally thousands of attacks per minute, at least at the banks I have consulted for. So the volume of transactions that need to be investigated is already overwhelming at the bank level. If you then consider that each bank is reporting thousands of suspect transactions per day to the authorities, it is easy to understand why the authorities just don't have the resources to examine every situation.

Assuming you do want to target a particular transaction... Transactions are usually layered, there might be 10 or more hops to get to the one you are looking at. And you can't just go look them up because there are privacy laws and national laws that must be complied with before you get to see the data - search warrants, discovery orders, authorisations to be obtained etc.... This all takes time, money and human resources.

So like most things in life it comes down to money - how much of the tax payers money should be spent on this?

From a practical point of view, we are down to the well know checks and balances, flagging up transactions that:

• Exceed certain limits
• Regular small transactions to an account or individual
• Target specific individuals, such as politicians, well know criminal etc

And then requiring people to justify those transactions.

For sure we are not going to catch every instance of a bad transition, but it is the best we can do in the circumstances. Yes the technology is capable of tracking every single flow that enters or exists the financial system, but to automate that checking would require people to give up their rights around the privacy of their financial affairs and I don't see that happening any time soon.

NIMAN

@Jim2007

That's all sounds very intricate, and frightening.

Do you think AI is going to be able to help the authorities tackle these types of scams? Or will the criminals always be one step ahead of them (perhaps using AI too)?

Jim2007

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121101902#Comment_121101902

I started working with AI in finance back in the early 1990s and while our programs have become a bit smarter, it still has not delivered on the potential it might have, despite all the media hype.

But it is not a lack of technology that is the problem here, it's a lack of will on the part of the of the clients and the banks. There are very few people who would agree to allowing all banks in even Europe say to have access to their accounts, I'm pretty sure most people in Ireland would not want someone like myself sitting at a console in Zurich to be able to go for a walk through their financial affaris. Likewise the banks themselves would not want it as that would mean any competitor could generate a list of their customers and target them. I worked primarily in Swiss private banking and idea of being able to generate a list wealthy Irish banking clients would be delightful! So no I'd don't think we are going to get to a point any time soon that we will have access to the necessary data to apply technology to solve this problem. It took 9/11 to get us this far.