Trade-based money laundering (TBML) was one of the five most popular subjects amongst fraud and financial crime professionals in 2021 on blogs managed by FICO, the California-based company best known for its measure of US consumer risk, the FICO score.
The other four most popular posts of the year dealt with non-fungible tokens, buy now pay later scams, courier scams and credit card fraud.
Growing risk
TBML is a growing risk according to FICO, which has now branched out from its original consumer focus to provide anti-money laundering (AML) services to help meet commercial know your customer, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, AML analytics, and fraud and financial crimes convergence needs.
The blogs include one that contains a basic exploration of some recent studies on TBML and discussion of some typical techniques employed by the criminals. Another explores the challenges of countering TBML and looks at some recent industry trends.
Wildlife focus
Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is the subject of another blog which discusses how banks can help organisations intent on preserving the earth’s fisheries, forests, wildlife and other natural resources by employing the increasingly sophisticated technologies used to monitor correspondent relationships or their trade finance operations.
In this blog, principal consultant in AML Compliance at FICO, Erik Stretz suggests that IWT risk must be part of a bank’s risk framework and their anti-money laundering risk assessment. This could be achieved by adding high-risk sources such as Africa and South America; transit countries including EU member states, and destination countries. China is the largest destination for wildlife items while Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Hong Kong are key receivers as well.
Erik Stretz’s blog, Illegal Wildlife Trade: What Banks Must Do, can be found here.
Links to other FICO TBML blogs can be found here.
Categories: Trade Based Financial crimes News
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