MONEY LAUNDERER by Kenneth Rijock
Whilst serving as a compliance officer, whether it is ordinary due diligence or the enhanced variety, I often used investigative tricks to help to verify the client's personal information. Remember, never box yourself into a corner, with perennially fixed procedures, and nothing more, because innovative money launderers will test your compliance system, learn from your information requests and your responses, and adapt the next time, to pass your compliance, and gain customer entry into the bank. Remember my golden rule: money launderers who are denied accounts by approaching the bank through the front door will often use the back door, or even the trap door. This means disguising an associate, and dressing up his or her personal information, specifically to pass compliance scrutiny. They learn from their mistakes, and are highly motivated to try again at the same exact financial institution where they were formerly denied access. Call it ego, or perhaps due to pressure from their employers/clients, but good money launderers will repeatedly attempt to place a confederate in a specific bank or NBFI that they want to use for funds transfers, or for laundering of illicit cash.
- The use of image search engines: whilst nearly everyone (80%, reportedly) uses Google or some other major search engine to look for new clients in Customer Identification Programmes (CIP), I suggest that you use the images,pictures or photos segments of these search engines to locate photographs of your subjects. Remember, criminals often do not realise that photographs taken at social or charitable events often appear in newspapers with Internet editions. Conversely, photographs can often document and verify employment, involvement in the community, membership in fraternal and professional associations, all indicia of legitimacy. I used image searches to find new clients at their listed workplace, at industry conferences and seminars, and in settings that verify personal information supplied by the client prior to account opening.
- Public and Real Estate records: whether you are looking for tax records, which list the record title holders of real property, or the actual warranty deeds and mortgages, real estate documents or websites are good sources of verification of not only addresses, but of the ownership of property. Whilst you are there searching, a quick check for judgments, liens and any other adverse information, all of which must generally be recorded in the Public Records database, will often expose fraudsters, con men, and financial criminals who are not what they have represented themselves to be. Perhaps the highest risk that a potential client can display, other than crime, is a track record of litigation against banks where he formerly transacted business. Most compliance officers, even though they are risk-oriented, rarely check civil court dockets for such lawsuits. Public records libraries/databases will usually show (recorded) judgments obtained by the customer against banks and non-bank financial institutions.
- Telephone number reverse look-up websites: Always access reliable telephone number sites, where the number will give you name/address results. This verifies important client-supplied information. Even though mobile numbers are generally excluded from these databases, other sites will tell you whether a number is indeed a mobile number, by the telephone exchange appearing therein. Some financial criminal will try to sip in bogus addresses, and think that the (usually) untraceable mobile number covers their tracks. learn to recognise mobile exchanges in your area. Also, learn those area codes and ZIP (Postal) codes, as errors there may be intentional, or a mistake which will lead you to the customer's real address out of town.
- Occupational and professional license websites: Is the client a license holder at the local, state, province or national level? Accessing the information can even reveal any disciplinary history, whether the client is a total fraud, and show you the unblemished record of a good potential client seeking to open accounts with you.
- Local criminal history databases: checking the prospective client in local criminal court databases can open your eyes to multiple white-collar arrests where there never were convictions, and even crimes of violence where adjudication of formal guilt were withheld. Local records can reveal important details about client conduct that could change your mind about the risks of accepting him or her as a customer.
I trust that these tips were helpful; more to follow.
Next week:
We discuss some of the alternative methods of information retrieval I used while in compliance.
The facts and opinions stated in this article are those of the author and not those of World-Check. World-Check does not warrant the accuracy of any facts and opinions stated in this article, does not endorse them, and accepts no responsibility for them.
Read more in this exciting series



