Friskie powder. Flea market jeans. Bambalachacha. Tweezes.
Do you know what any of these are? 👀
Or, what about … Thorium-227? Tungsten alloys? Phosphorous pentachloride?
🔔 Still not ringing any bells? Not to worry.
The good news is you don’t need to know what all these actually are. What you need to know is how specialist terms and evolving language can help you identify and prevent financial crime.
Let me explain. (Starting with the obvious…)
Transaction monitoring
If you’re in the financial crime fighting business, you already know that transaction monitoring is an important part of an anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing strategy. It allows firms like yours to detect suspicious activity by flagging instances of large cash deposits, wire transfers, or behaviours out of line with a customer profile. Transaction monitoring is a regulatory requirement in all jurisdictions. The Financial Action Task Force recommends that banks adjust their monitoring using a risk-based approach that tailors controls to higher or lower risk clients.
One crucial component of transaction monitoring is screening payments (counterparties, payment descriptions, and other fields) against sanctions lists, blacklists, and designated names. But it’s not just for sanctions evasion. You can detect other types of crime by screening for keywords that could indicate drug dealing, weapons trafficking, wildlife trafficking, or right-wing terrorism.
Capturing the nuances and expressions of these crimes solidifies and enhances your financial institution’s transaction monitoring strategy — but it isn’t always easy!
Why lingo matters
We know that screening payments for keywords is important. But what do language peculiarities have to do with it?
Let’s consider how diverse crime is — occurring within different cultures and subcultures. Each culture, group, or gang may have its own expressions to refer to the same thing. Sometimes designed to confuse authorities, the language of criminals is often specific and intentionally hidden from the mainstream.
Youth culture also influences slang, sparking the invention of vocabulary and stylistic practices like shortening words or phrases. Social media is the perfect environment to showcase this, with an enormous impact on shaping language and culture, including in areas of financial crime. For example, money mules are often recruited through social media channels like Instagram and Snapchat, with recruiters using particular language to conceal their meaning, either intentionally or inadvertently.
To complicate matters, the language and slang words used to describe illegal substances or activities are fluid and evolve over time. For example, “dope” no longer really refers to “cannabis”, despite iconic though dated references. This concoction of factors means outsiders unexposed to the cultural peculiarities of a given group, which include law enforcement and financial crime analysts like us 👋, may have a difficult time understanding the language codes that could indicate criminal activity.
If you’ve seen the critically acclaimed TV series The Wire (we’re big fans at FINTRAIL and recently chatted about the show here), you’ll note it cleverly demonstrates how criminals use specific language to avoid detection. It also explores how dialect and social class interact.
Let’s look at a quick case study here…
According to the algorithm behind the website Urban Thesaurus, the top 5 slang words for "weapon" are: “pretzel”, “dick cheney”, “llama”, “quad laser” and “pack” (no, me neither).
Here’s another example…
Surprising, right?
At FINTRAIL, we’ve previously looked into the issue of money muling (aka “squaring”) in the UK, where again, we see a whole new set of terms emerge. A bank card is a “square”, a bank account is an “AC”, an accomplice working in a bank is a “striker”.
So in short, financial crime fighters may find themselves a tad out of touch with the language used by criminals. And understandably so.
But for a transaction monitoring system to be effective, keyword searches must account for this complex interplay of factors and reflect on-the-ground reality. Otherwise you’ll never know what a “tickler” is and miss catching that shady transaction involving “hooch”.
How FINTRAIL can help
Just because you struggle to keep on top of the nuances of the lingo of criminals, doesn’t mean your transaction monitoring system has to.
FINTRAIL’s Transaction Monitoring Keywords product contains hundreds of hand-selected words expertly compiled by our Consult team, drawing on extensive research and on-the-ground experience reviewing real-world transactions. Using authoritative government and industry group sources to provide maximum coverage, these keywords cover the following categories:
Controlled dual-use items
Controlled military items
Torture goods
Radioactive sources
Drugs
Weapons
Wildlife-trafficking
Right-wing terrorism
The keyword list can be updated to add words to cover your financial institution’s exact needs and risk concerns. Where primary and relevant sources of open source research have informed specific lists, these have been noted for your reference to enable further research.
If you’d like to find out more and start fortifying your transaction monitoring programme ASAP — give us a shout here.