March 10, 2016
An expert on money laundering is warning that banks are missing vast amounts of suspicious financial transactions linked to terrorism.
Ron Pol, a business analyst, who is also doing a doctorate in anti-money laundering, said it was still far too easy in this country for money to end up in the wrong hands.
Mr Pol said the terrorism financing behaviours institutions tried to spot were completely different to those underlying money laundering and were not covered under the Act, which was too complex.
“Money laundering systems are designed to identify unusual transactions, so if you’ve got an unemployed 23-year-old banking $10,000 in cash every week it sends up a red flag because it doesn’t match his profile.
“With terrorist financing there’s often nothing unusual to spot because the money was earned legitimately, so it completely matches that person’s profile. Then when they send it to ISIS or whoever, or they collect their funds together and head off and travel to Syria, that’s the very first time that it can be spotted in a financial system.
The number of financial transactions suspected of being linked to terrorism has almost doubled in the last two years, from 21 to 40 cases.