How I Caught a Massive Money Laundering Ring in Bangladesh Using Graph Analysis
Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash Sitting at my desk, sipping coffee, I stared at the screen in front of me - 10,000 suspicious transactions in one day, all passing the BDT 100,000 threshold. I was working as an AML compliance analyst at a leading fintech in Bangladesh, and this was not what I wanted to see on a Monday morning. The transactions were spread across various mobile financial services (MFS) like bKash, Nagad, and Rocket. We had to report these to the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit (BFIU) as soon as possible. But how do we connect the dots and figure out if these are part of a larger money laundering network? The Hidden Problem Standard approaches to detecting money laundering often rely on simple threshold monitoring and rule-based systems. But these can generate a huge number of false positives, overwhelming the compliance team. In Bangladesh, the MFS threshold monitoring is a critical component of AML regulations, but it's not enough on its own. That'...