The BBC News has posted a report that the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), based in the UK, is warning individuals to avoid online money-making schemes that turn them into unsuspecting “money mules.” The article explains:

Fraudsters are using a variety of bogus and legitimate recruitment channels to con job-hunters into thinking they have found genuine employment. But in each case the job comes down to asking the victim to receive relatively small amounts of money into their own account and then move them onwards to another bank.

The result is that unsuspecting individuals can become liable for stolen money being funneled through their accounts and end up suffering the consequences. As an essential component of many types of fraud, money laundering is a big problem because it enables criminals to move money around without being traced to the initial theft. This not only affects online banking, but it is also a problem anywhere money changes hands—like online casinos or auction sites.

Money laundering is one of the big issues that many of our clients face, and we’ve discovered that there are some key characteristics associated with the problem that device reputation technology can reveal. Here are three things that we help our clients look for to expose organized fraud rings likely to be involved in laundering money:

• Too many accounts accessed by a single PC – One of the first indicators of potential money laundering (as well as several other types of fraud) is a high number of accounts associated with a single computer. For criminals, it is common behavior to be running anywhere from ten to several hundred accounts, so that money can be transferred and moved around without detection.
• Too many devices accessing a single account – The converse of the first indicator can also be a sign of money laundering. Many devices accessing a single account can indicate that several people are all sharing an account, which may be typical behavior of criminals running schemes.
• The web of associations – A web of association shows connections that exist between accounts and computers. With money laundering rings, and other organized fraud groups, this web can grow quite large, encompassing hundreds of accounts and devices.

Any one of these three items can be an indicator of organized money laundering and often you will see all three. It is also important that online banks and online merchants work together and share information to expose this behavior and prevent it from spreading. Money laundering doesn’t limit itself to one bank, so relationships between different banks can bring fraud to light that was previously invisible.

Tags: account velocity, fraud prevention, money laundering, Online Fraud, online fraud schemes

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Financial Services, Online Gambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.