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Fighting organized crime by automatically detecting money laundering-related financial transactions

Published: 17 August 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Money laundering is the set of operations aimed at giving a legitimate appearance to capital whose origin is illegal, thus making it more difficult to identify and subsequently recover it. It is one of the phenomena on which the so-called underground economy relies and therefore constitutes a crime for which the charge for money laundering applies. For supporting the fight against this phenomenon, the interest towards analysis models for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) based on a combined use of automatic tools and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques increases, as it is also shown by the European Central Bank (ECB) during recent press conferences. Following this direction, this paper proposes a model for enhancing the detection of suspicious transactions related to money laundering. It is based on a set of features that are defined by considering different aspects such as the time, the amount of money, number of transactions, type of operations and level of internationalization. An AI-based computational approach centered on Machine Learning (ML) techniques has been adopted to evaluate the goodness of such feature-based model, in supporting the automatic detection of suspicious transactions, by experimenting 5 different classifiers. From the experiments emerged that the Random Forest provided the best performance not only among the classifiers tested within the paper, but also in comparison to those presented in the related work with an accuracy, a recall and f1-score greater than 94% by decreasing the False Positive Rate (FPR). Furthermore, an analysis on the feature importance has been provided, to understand which feature, among the proposed ones, plays the major role in such application domain.

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  • (2024)Improving Anti-money Laundering via�Fourier-Based Contrastive LearningAdvances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1007/978-981-97-2259-4_25(331-343)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2024
  • (2023)Enhancing Anti-Money Laundering: Development of a Synthetic Transaction Monitoring Dataset2023 IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE)10.1109/ICEBE59045.2023.00028(47-54)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2023
  • (2022)INVESTIGATION OF FINANCIAL FRAUD DETECTION BY USING COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE12th International Scientific Conference “Business and Management 2022”10.3846/bm.2022.787Online publication date: 2022

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ARES '21: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
August 2021
1447 pages
ISBN:9781450390514
DOI:10.1145/3465481
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 17 August 2021

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Author Tags

  1. Money laundering detection
  2. classification
  3. financial transaction analysis
  4. machine learning

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ARES 2021

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Overall Acceptance Rate 228 of 451 submissions, 51%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Improving Anti-money Laundering via Fourier-Based Contrastive LearningAdvances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1007/978-981-97-2259-4_25(331-343)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2024
  • (2023)Enhancing Anti-Money Laundering: Development of a Synthetic Transaction Monitoring Dataset2023 IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE)10.1109/ICEBE59045.2023.00028(47-54)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2023
  • (2022)INVESTIGATION OF FINANCIAL FRAUD DETECTION BY USING COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE12th International Scientific Conference “Business and Management 2022”10.3846/bm.2022.787Online publication date: 2022

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