Money laundering and cybercrime

Date: May 03, 2005
Source: Computer Crime Research Center
By: CCRC staff

The emergence of electronic money and global systems of electronic payments formed a parallel banking system. It has the entire network of semi-legal financial institutions. The unique opportunities of quickly shaped infrastructure drew attention of criminal groups at once. It allowed anyone to rapidly transfer monetary funds to any country, anonymously, through tangled routes. Heretofore, electronic transfers interested criminals as the efficient tool to conceal sources of money intakes, to launder illegally earned money and to conceal their incomes to evade taxes.

Here's one of the criminal schemes of payment operations. There operations can be hardly tracked by law enforcement: upon receipt of merchandise, let's say drugs, the buyer electronically transfers money to the credit card of the supplier. The last at one stroke transfers this money through the system of electronic payments to his bank account in the country with
strong bank secrecy laws. Then the supplier can simply transfer his money to the card account in parts and can easily use these money.

In Russia, one of the registered forms of computer crimes purposing to evade taxes is the use of computers to interfere with pool memory of electronic cashier registers installed at shops. As a result of such interference, the registry of payments is modified or deleted. It allows to hide real incomes from tax administrations.

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