One of the largest police operations against money laundering in the world has been running for several months and has delivered spectacular results, as the European criminal police agency Europol described on Monday, December 4th. The Dutch-led operation, which involved 25 other countries on several continents, was organized in collaboration with around 2,800 banking institutions, companies such as Western Union, Tripadvisor and IT companies, as well as Interpol and Eurojust, the judicial cooperation department of the Netherlands Twenty-seven.
Some 4,600 investigations launched in Europe, the US, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Latin America have identified 474 members of criminal groups that recruited more than ten thousand “financial mules”, people who exchange money in cash or digital transfers for a commission. Part of the operations uncovered consisted of money transfers from one country to another. In other cases, “mules” traveling under false identities opened accounts abroad.
However, the most commonly used technique remains “smurfing” or “restructuring”. Small amounts of cash are deposited into bank accounts belonging to different people and in modest amounts in order to avoid attracting attention.
More and more sophisticated techniques
In total, the police and judicial authorities mobilized since June have detected 10,736 fraudulent transactions and arrested 1,013 people. According to Europol, the suspects laundered around 100 million euros in a few months, but the operation managed to avoid concealing 32 million in funds. An amount that must be compared with estimates of the total amount of money laundering in Europe, which is estimated at around 200 billion euros.
This ninth operation of its kind, called EMMA9 (for European Money Mule Action), confirmed the growth and sophistication of the techniques criminals use to launder dirty money.
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Investigators found that Ukrainian refugees have become new targets for recruiters trying to exploit their vulnerability by forcing them to open bank accounts. Older people are also primarily targeted by criminal groups who do not shy away from directly threatening them in order to obtain their identification documents and their signature.
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