Recent Mule Arrests by EMMA Highlight Need for more International Cooperation
Money laundering and financial fraud continue to thrive internationally and while the exact extent of its scale is hard to determine, it appears to be increasing alarmingly. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that between 2 and 5% of global GDP is laundered each year, translated to approximately EUR 715 billion – 1.87 trillion each year, according to recent estimates.
While it is an offense on its own, money laundering also closely relates to other forms of serious and organized crime as well as the financing of terrorism, according to Europol.
Organized crime groups utilize a variety of money laundering schemes. GlobalSource has successfully investigated several cases involving money laundering, financial crime, and corruption and traced assets and flow of funds in more than 80 jurisdictions across the globe for banks, law firms, and others. As such, we have a thorough understanding of common mechanisms utilized in such schemes, while assisting clients with actionable intelligence.
Recently, the use of money mules has been widespread in cybercrime, with the mules transferring the proceeds from their jurisdiction to the criminal’s home country, Europol reports.
On December 5, 2022, Europol announced the arrest of 8,755 money mules alongside 222 money mule recruiters and 2469 individuals in its eighth edition of the European Money Mule Action (EMMA8). Supported by Eurojust, INTERPOL, and the European Banking Federation (EBF), the latest operational phase began in September and ran until November 2022. In cooperation with the EBF, 4,089 fraudulent transactions were identified, successfully preventing EUR 17.5 million from being laundered by money mules.
EMMA has operated since 2016 and is the largest international operation of its kind, built around the idea that public-private information sharing is key to fighting complex modern crimes, according to Europol. Participants of the private sector include 1,800 banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, FinTechs, and know-your-customer (KYC) companies that support law enforcement.
