Online banking and cryptocurrencies have made it easier for criminals to transfer and withdraw money without detection. The prevention of money laundering has become an international effort and now includes terrorist funding among its targets.

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Anti-money laundering refers to laws, regulations, and procedures intended to stop criminals from disguising illegally obtained funds as legitimate income.

Concentration Account A concentration account is a deposit account used to aggregate funds from several locations into one centralized account.

A certified anti-money laundering specialist CAMS works to spot attempts to obscure the origins of the proceeds of crime.

White-Collar Crime Definition A white-collar crime is a non-violent crime committed by an individual, typically for financial gain. Partner Links.

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New York Daily News. They can't successfully operate without using some form of money laundering to avoid detection and prosecution. Money laundering is used to hide cash from crimes like drug trafficking, as well as funds from white-collar crimes such as embezzlement or tax evasion schemes.

Money laundering is a threat to everyone because it provides the means for terrorists, drug dealers, human traffickers, arms dealers, fraudsters, identity thieves, and others to expand their influence and operations.

The money laundering process has three distinct stages: placement, layering, and integration. The first step is to move the "dirty" money into the financial system.

One tactic is to use many small, inconspicuous cash transactions, such as using multiple accomplices to purchase gift cards, buy money orders, or make small cash deposits into bank accounts.

Another tactic is to mix the dirty funds with the clean money earned by a front company. Money launderers may also use foreign banks in countries with weak financial crime enforcement to open accounts with cash or other funds.

Once the funds have entered the financial system, criminals use a flurry of complicated financial transactions, or layers, to distance the money from its original illegal source.

At this stage, criminals may buy and sell high-value items like jewelry, artwork, or automobiles. They may use professionals to set up trust accounts, open correspondent accounts from foreign banks, or purchase financial products like insurance, stocks, or bonds.

Finally, the money is funneled from the layers to a new source that is accessible to the criminal. The high-value artwork is sold, the financial products are liquidated, or the money is distributed from trusts or correspondent accounts.

Other major issues facing the world's economies include errors in economic policy resulting from artificially inflated financial sectors.

Massive influxes of dirty cash into particular areas of the economy that are desirable to money launderers create false demand, and officials act on this new demand by adjusting economic policy.

When the laundering process reaches a certain point or if law-enforcement officials start to show interest, all of that money that will suddenly disappear without any predictable economic cause, and that financial sector falls apart.

Some problems on a more local scale relate to taxation and small-business competition. Laundered money is usually untaxed, meaning the rest of us ultimately have to make up the loss in tax revenue.

Also, legitimate small businesses can't compete with money-laundering front businesses that can afford to sell a product for cheaper because their primary purpose is to clean money, not turn a profit.

They have so much cash coming in that they might even sell a product or service below cost. The majority of global investigations focus on two prime money-laundering industries: Drug trafficking and terrorist organizations.

The effect of successfully cleaning drug money is clear: More drugs, more crime, more violence. The connection between money laundering and terrorism may be a bit more complex, but it plays a crucial role in the sustainability of terrorist organizations.

Most people who financially support terrorist organizations do not simply write a personal check and hand it over to a member of the terrorist group.

They send the money in roundabout ways that allow them to fund terrorism while maintaining anonymity. And on the other end, terrorists do not use credit cards and checks to purchase the weapons, plane tickets and civilian assistance they need to carry out a plot.

They launder the money so authorities can't trace it back to them and foil their planned attack. Interrupting the laundering process can cut off funding and resources to terrorist groups.

For decades, the U. Its popularity is due to its wide acceptance and the volume of worldwide transactions that use the currency — a few million extra dollars changing hands doesn't attract attention.

However, the euro has slowly gained a foothold in the laundering industry since its introduction into common use in As far as money laundering goes, the euro could be the perfect currency: It is the main legal tender of more than a dozen countries, meaning it circulates in tremendous volume and moves regularly across borders without any notice at all.

So pervasive is the problem that as of , the EU has five anti-money laundering directives. The fifth, and most recent, expands the powers of regulators to handle virtual currency transactions, a growing phenomenon which we'll come back to on the final page [source: Treanor ].

It's a daunting task to trace the origins of any deposit when there are many hundreds of thousands of global wire transfers equaling trillions of dollars occurring every day [source: U.

Which is the dirty money and which is the clean stuff? Within the United States, there are two primary methods employed by the government to detect and combat money laundering: legislation and law enforcement.

The United States addresses the crime of money laundering in countless legislative acts. Here are just a few of them:. It gives the Treasury Department the ability to force banks to keep records that make it easier to spot a laundering operation.

A banker who consistently violates this rule can serve up to 10 years in prison. The Money Laundering Control Act makes money laundering a crime in itself instead of just an element of another crime, and the Money Laundering Suppression Act orders banks to establish their own money-laundering task forces to weed out suspicious activity in their institutions.

The U. Patriot Act sets up mandatory identity checks for U. In addition to legislation intended to detect a money-laundering operation, undercover stings are also a component of the fight.

The DEA out of Atlanta conducted a sting operation that involved providing resources to drug traffickers to launder money.

Despite these victories, the truth is that no individual nation has the power to stop money laundering — if one country is hostile to laundering, criminals simply look elsewhere for a place to clean their money.

Global cooperation is essential. The FATF issued the "40 Recommendations" for banks there are actually 49 now, but the moniker hasn't changed that have become the anti-money-laundering standard.

These recommendations include:. The "recommendations" are really more like rules than friendly tips. The FATF keeps a list of "uncooperative countries" — those who have not enacted the recommendations.

The FATF encourages its member states not to deal with those countries in financial matters. While increased worldwide efforts are making a small dent in the money-laundering industry, the problem is huge, and the money launderers are winning overall.

Countries with bank-secrecy rules, which arguably have legitimate benefits to the honest depositor, make it extremely hard to track money once it's transferred overseas.

They say politics makes strange bedfellows — apparently so does crime. In recent years, the international organizations devoted to curbing money laundering have been focusing their attention on the strange confluence of terrorism and the art market.

On closer inspection, this unexpected pairing begins to make sense. In two important respects, the art market is tailor-made for money laundering — it has long cultivated a tradition of secrecy and it often involves the transfer of large sums of money.

By contrast, in the world of real estate, the buyer, the seller and the broker are all subject to strictly enforced legal obligations to disclose who they are, what's being bought and for how much.

But in the art world, few such rules apply. Sometimes auction houses don't know who owns the article they're selling or even who they're selling it too.

Now factor in the operational costs of terrorist groups like ISIS, who have seized control of some of the richest archaeological territory in the world.

ISIS is known to be directly self-financing through the sale of looted items known as "blood antiques," from which they've raised tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars [source: Watson ].