By Davin Nina 1 Péan Maxence

Money laundering is an activity that consists of legitimizing the proceeds of crime by integrating them into the economic system. The primary objective of this process is to conceal the origin of money from illegal activities (drug trafficking, insider trading, corruption, etc.). The proceeds of these crimes take different forms. It can be cash, financial assets or material objects (works of art, jewelry, etc.). Money laundering is most often carried out in three distinct stages: placement, layering and integration. The placement stage consists of placing the dirty money in the financial system. Most often, criminal organizations come through companies to increase the inflow of capital, which is then deposited in a banking institution. Afterwards, the stratification process takes place, which consists of a large series of conversions and movements of funds in order to mask the origin of these products. Finally, once the money is laundered, it is reused by criminals to finance their activities. Today, the emergence of new information and communication technologies (NICT) in particular is giving a new boost to money laundering activities. The advent of online payment systems, crypto-currencies and dematerialized cash transfers make it even more difficult to track down illegal money transfers. Moreover, the multiplication of online auctions or gambling sites greatly facilitates money laundering. Faced with the development of these new methods, the authorities of European countries are trying to set up a new system to fight against money laundering, in particular by strengthening their cooperation. In addition, following the numerous attacks that occurred in the decade 2010-2020, the fight against the financing of terrorism has become the focus of these institutions. Despite the strengthening of the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing (AML/CFT), the latter "has weaknesses1". These weaknesses are based on "institutional fragmentation and insufficient coordination at the European Union level2" but also because the EU bodies have "limited tools". Furthermore, following the work of many researchers, it is estimated that today the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing is liberticide. Indeed, as early as 2003, a report by the CNIL pointed out the numerous liberticidal measures to fight against money laundering. In this paper, we will first present the framework of the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing in the European Union (I), then we will describe the main flaws of this system (II), and finally we will demonstrate that this fight is today deeply liberticidal, notably because of the tools it uses (III)

Sciencespo.aix. ND. ca. 2021.p.12.

By Tomas Williams, Pablo Slutzky, and Mauricio Villamizar-Villegas

We explore how anti-money laundering (AML) policies affect banks and credit provision to firms. For identification we exploit the enactment of a financial regulation in Colombia. Aimed at controlling the flow of money from drug trafficking into the financial system, we find that after implementation bank deposits in municipalities with high drug trafficking decline. This negative liquidity shock has consequences for credit in other municipalities. Banks sourcing their deposits from areas with high drug trafficking cut lending relative to other banks. Using a proprietary database containing data on bank-firm credit relationships, we show that small firms that rely on credit from affected banks experience a negative shock to sales, investment, and profitability. Furthermore, we use night-lights data to show that these results are not due to a reallocation of activity across firms nor between the formal and informal sectors. Our evidence uncovers a hidden to be considered when implementing AML policies.

Washington, DC: Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, 2020. 62p.

By Pacelli, Joseph, Janet Gao, Jan Schneemeier, and Yufeng Wu.

Bank employees face discretion in investigating and reporting money laundering activities via suspicious activity reports (SARs), a primary tool to combat financial crimes. We investigate the incentives banks face to initiate SARs and the implications for criminal activity. Our theoretical and empirical analyses document that banks with more profit-seeking pressure adopt lax reporting policies to attract criminal customers, ultimately leading to more suspicious activity reports. A structural estimation approach helps us uncover the relation between bank profitability, reporting stringency, and the demand from criminal customers. Our results also suggest an assortative matching between lax banks and criminal clientele.

Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 2021. 61p.,

By Gaurav Khanna, Carlos Medina, Anant Nyshadham, Christian Posso, Jorge Tamayo

We investigate the effects of job displacement, as a result of mass-layoffs, on criminal arrests using a matched employer-employee-crime dataset from Medellín, Colombia. Job displacement leads to immediate and persistent earnings losses, and higher probability of arrest for both the displaced worker and family members. Leveraging a banking policy-reform, we find that greater access to credit attenuates the criminal response to job loss. Impacts on arrests are pronounced for property crimes and among younger men for whom opportunities in criminal enterprises are prevalent. Taken together, our results are consistent with economic incentives contributing to criminal participation decisions after job losses.

Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 2020. 35p.

By Environmental Investigation Agency

EIA’s latest report, The Vanishing Point: Criminality, Corruption and the Devastation of Tanzania’s Elephants, delves into how Tanzania’s elephants are once more being slaughtered in vast numbers to feed a resurgent ivory trade in China in an illegal trade driven by Chinese criminal syndicates and Tanzanian corruption. Vanishing Point reveals how some politicians from Tanzania’s ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party and well-connected businesspeople use their influence to protect ivory traffickers. The video below provides an overview, complemented by firsthand accounts, of the corruption in Tanzania and the Chinese market providing an outlet for illegal poaching.

London; Washington, DC: EIA, 2015. 36p.

By Julian Rademeyer.

Much has been written about state-sponsored North Korean criminal activity in Asia and Europe. But relatively little attention has been devoted to North Korea’s illicit activities in Africa, which run the gamut from trafficking of rhino horn and ivory to gold and tobacco. This report – which draws on hundreds of pages of documents, academic research, press reports and interviews with government officials, diplomats and defectors in Southern Africa and South Korea – presents an overview of evidence implicating North Korea in criminal activity ranging from smuggling and drug trafficking to the manufacturing of counterfeit money and black market cigarettes. It examines North Korea’s current involvement in Africa, the complex history of African-North Korean relations and allegations that the country’s embassies in several African states are intimately connected to a complex web of illicit activity aimed at bolstering the Kim Jong-un regime and enriching cash-strapped diplomats. An analysis of press reports and other publicly available information conducted by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime shows that North Korean diplomatic passport holders have been implicated in at least 18 cases of rhino horn and ivory smuggling in Africa since 1986. Despite North Korea’s waning influence on the continent, incriminating evidence linking its diplomats to ivory and rhino horn smuggling continues to emerge. The report includes interviews with a number of high-level North Korean defectors about their knowledge of, and stated involvement in, a range of criminal activities. They claim that smuggling by North Korean diplomats is widespread, with couriers traveling regularly to Pyongyang and Beijing in China with diplomatic bags stuffed with contraband. “[D]iplomats…would come from Africa carrying rhino horn, ivory and gold nuggets,” explained one defector who ran a North Korean front company in Beijing. “Every embassy [in Africa] was coming two or three times every year.” The persistent abuse of diplomatic immunity by North Korean diplomats and agents poses a particularly vexing problem for law enforcement. Increasing economic sanctions and isolationist policies designed to cripple North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities are likely to fuel the expansion of the regime’s illicit activities and statesponsored criminal networks.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2017. 40p.

By Mark Galeotti and Anna Arutunyan.

Globally, connections between crime, war and insurrection are inescapable, and the undeclared struggle over the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, before Russia’s open invasion in February 2022, was no exception to the rule. Since Russia first encouraged, facilitated, armed and bankrolled the rising of the rebellious pseudo-states of south-eastern Donbas in 2014, there had been a pervasive connection between crime, war and insurrection. Despite continued sporadic skirmishes, by 2015, it seemed that the conflict had largely stabilized. A violent and confused hybrid of insurrection and foreign invasion, had led to the creation of the self-proclaimed pseudo-states of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR, respectively). Together, they controlled roughly 30% of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and had a combined population of approximately 2 to 2.3 million people. This was a status quo that not only encouraged criminalization, but was based on it. Industrial-scale smuggling of everything from coal to narcotics helped sustain the internationally unrecognized pseudo-states of Donbas; gangsters became militiamen; and money-laundering networks meanwhile bypassed sanctions

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2022. 56p.

By Arthur Conan Doyle .

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to the fore to publicize the dreadful massacres and genocidal crimes of Belgium’s King Leopold, who, fraudulently bought up all the land that he could then call it his Congo. He actually “owned” his own country. He then proceeded to exploit the indigenous peoples of the Congo to rob the Congo of its “riches.” He treated all the Congolese peoples as his personal slaves and used them to produce sugar, rubber and whatever else he could export and build his own riches and the lavish mansion in France and Belgium. An influential writer like Conan Doyle was needed to expose Leopold for the evil tyrant that he was, because, incredibly, Leopold achieved all his horrible gains under the guise of “humanity” and “charity” in helping the Congo people to become civilized.

NY. Doubleday. (1909) 156 pages.

By Mark Twain.

The Facts Concerning The Recent Carnival Of Crime In Connecticut. “Straightway the door opened, and a shriveled, shabby dwarf entered. He was not more than two feet high. He seemed to be about forty years old. Every feature and every inch of him was a trifle out of shape; and so, while one could not put his finger upon any particular part and say, “This is a conspicuous deformity,” the spectator perceived that this little person was a deformity as a whole—a vague, general, evenly blended, nicely adjusted deformity. There was a fox-like cunning in the face and the sharp little eyes, and also alertness and malice. And yet, this vile bit of human rubbish seemed to bear a sort of remote and ill-defined resemblance to me! “

Atlantic Monthly June (1876) 17 pages.

By Hargrave Lee Adam.

From the Cradle to the Grave. “Some years ago I set myself the task of studying crime and prison life in all its phases. Not merely to accept hearsay evidence, but to see and hear with my own eyes and ears all that was significant on the subject that I could. Therefore, whereever anything was to be learned concerning crime I there prosecuted and observed for my inquiries myself what transpired.”

London: T. Werner Laurie, 346p.

By Robert J. Ingersoll.

In addition to these, nations have relied on confiscation and degradation, on maimings, whippings, brandings, and exposures to public ridicule and contempt. Connected with the court of justice was the chamber of torture. The ingenuity of man was exhausted in that would surely the construction the most reach of instruments sensitive nerve. All this was in the interest protection of virtue, and done of civilization — for the states. the well-being of how Curiously enough, the fact is that, no matter severe the punishments were, the crimes increased.

NY. Farrell (1892) 49 pages.

By Alexander Dumas.

“The Crimes were published in Paris, in 1839-40, in eight volumes, comprising eighteen titles…. The success of the original work was instantaneous. Dumas laughingly said that he thought he had exhausted the subject of famous crimes, until he became deluged with letters from every province in France, supplying him with material upon other deeds of violence! The subjects which he has chosen, however, are of both historic and dramatic importance.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1910) 1,565 pages.

Edited by Gergana Bulanova-Hristova, Karsten Kasper, Geralda Odinot, Maite Verhoeven, Ronald Pool, Christianne de Poot, Yael Werner and Lars Korsell.

The threats arising from different types of cybercrime are real and constantly evolving, as the internet with its anonymity and borderless reach provides new opportunities for physical and virtual criminal activities. We can see complex cybercriminal networks connecting subgroups and also single individuals that are active on, through and against the internet. At the same time there are also ‘offline’ criminal organisations using the internet to facilitate their activities and to increase their profit. Even so-called ‘traditional’ organised crime groups are widening their criminal portfolios by committing cybercrime. By constantly evolving online opportunities, their acts of ‘traditional crimes’ become even more far-reaching and damaging, thus benefiting the criminal organisation. It is not only the involvement of organised crime in cybercrime that is dangerous, but also cybercrime committed in an organised manner. Cyber-OC represents the convergence of these two phenomena. Despite the huge threat arising from its cumulative character, Cyber-OC is frequently underestimated and differently defined even by law enforcement authorities.

Wiesbaden: Bundeskriminalamt Criminalistic Institute, 2016. 298p.

By R. S. van Wegberg.

Many scientific studies and industry reports have observed the emergence of so-called cybercrime-as-a-service. The idea is that specialized suppliers in the underground economy cater to criminal entrepreneurs in need of certain capabilities – substituting specialized technical knowledge with “knowing what to buy”. The impact of this trend could be dramatic, as technical skill becomes an insignificant entry barrier for cybercrime. Forms of cybercrime motivated by financial gain, make use of a unique configuration of technical capabilities to be successful. Profit-driven cybercrimes, as they are called, range from carding to financial malware, and from extortion to cryptojacking. Given their reliance on technical capabilities, particularly these forms of cybercrime benefit from a changing crime paradigm: the commoditization of cybercrime. That is, standardized offerings of technical capabilities supplied through structured markets by specialized vendors that cybercriminals can contract to fulfill tools and techniques used in their business model. Commoditization enables outsourcing of components used in cybercrime - i.e., a botnet or cash-out solution. Thus lowering entry barriers for aspiring criminals, and potentially driving further growth in cybercrime. As many cybercriminal entrepreneurs lack the skills to provision certain parts of their business model, this incentivizes them to outsource these parts to specialized criminal vendors. With online anonymous markets - like Silk Road or AlphaBay - these entrepreneurs have found a new platform to contract vendors and acquire technical capabilities for a range of cybercriminal business models. A configuration of technical capabilities used in a business model reflects the value chain of resources. Here, not the criminal activities themselves, but the technical enablers for all these criminal activities are depicted. To create a comprehensive understanding of how businessmodels in profit-driven cybercrime are impacted by the commoditization of cybercrime, we investigate how outsourced components can fulfill technical capabilities needed in profit-driven cybercrime. This is where we use an economic lens to deliver an overview of criminal activities, resources and strategies in profit-driven cybercrime. In turn, knowing how outsourcing fulfils A study into the treatment of victims and its effects on their attitudes and behaviourparts of the value chain, can help law enforcement exploit ‘chokepoints’ – i.e., use the weakest link in the value chain where criminals appear to be vulnerable.

Delft University of Technology, 2020. 202p.

By Grace E. A.Di Meo.

The historiography of female violence has largely centred on women’s experiences as victims or on their perpetration of lethal acts such as murder and infanticide. In the last decade, however, scholars have paid increasing attention to women’s perpetration of non-lethal violent crime. This thesis contributes to recent scholarship by examining female acts of assault in late Victorian and Edwardian England in an understudied region of the country: whilst most historians have focused on the North, South East or Midlands, this study draws attention to the South West of the country and situates women’s acts of minor violence within the context of wider national patterns. Focusing specifically on cases prosecuted at the Exeter and Cheltenham magistrates’ courts in the years 1880-1909, the thesis follows women through different stages of their offending trajectories: the perpetration of their acts; their treatment by magistrates; their portrayal in the media; and, finally, their experiences after facing prosecution.

Using evidence from court records, newspapers and census returns, the study employs both quantitative and qualitative analyses in order to examine patterns in the perpetration and outcome of female non-lethal violence. These examinations reveal that women’s ‘expected’ and ‘actual’ roles – especially those relating to motherhood, wifehood and the neighbourhood – impacted not only the ways in which their assaults were committed but also on their treatment by the justice system and the media. It is also demonstrated that women’s positions could contribute to their propensity to reoffend, an action which sometimes resulted in women’s marginalisation in post-offending life. By following the women’s experiences from the onset to aftermath of their violence, this thesis offers an original and comprehensive contribution to the historiography of female violence in late Victorian and Edwardian England.

Bristol, UK: University of Bristol 2020. 264p.

National Research Council.

Most major crime in this country emanates from two major data sources. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports has collected information on crimes known to the police and arrests from local and state jurisdictions throughout the country. The National Crime Victimization Survey, a general population survey designed to cover the extent, nature, and consequences of criminal victimization, has been conducted annually since the early1970s. This workshop was designed to consider similarities and differences in the methodological problems encountered by the survey and criminal justice research communities and what might be the best focus for the research community. In addition to comparing and contrasting the methodological issues associated with self-report surveys and official records, the workshop explored methods for obtaining accurate self-reports on sensitive questions about crime events, estimating crime and victimization in rural counties and townships and developing unbiased prevalence and incidence rates for rate events among population subgroups.

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2003. 111p.

Weulen Kranenbarg, M.

The main goal of this dissertation was to empirically compare cyber-offenders with traditional offenders on four domains in criminology: offending over the life-course, personal and situational risk factors for offending and victimisation, similarity in deviance in the social network, and motivations related to different offence clusters. The focus was on new forms of crime that target IT and in which IT is key in the commission of the crime, so-called cyber-dependent crimes, like malicious hacking, web defacement, illegal control over IT-systems, malware use, and so on. These crimes provide a unique test case for traditional criminological explanations for offending, as these did not exist prior to the rise in the use of ITsystems. The anonymous digital context in which these crimes take place may have changed, for example, the situations in which opportunities for committing crime occur, the skills and personality characteristics that are needed to commit these crimes, the perceptions of the consequences of offending, and the interpersonal dynamics between offenders and victims.

Amsterdam: Free University of Amsterdam, 2018. 230p.

By Marleen Weulen Kranenbarg, Yaloe van der Toolen, Frank Weerman.

This report aims to increase our insight into the explanation of cyber-delinquency among juveniles. We examined which individual characteristics and environmental factors are related to different types of cybercrime, with a specific focus on the importance of peer relationships. We used a longitudinal research design (three waves of data collection) among a substantial sample of Dutch youths in secondary or tertiary education (with ages between 12 and 25), who were following ICT programmes, tracks, or courses. These students were chosen because they are considered to be at an elevated risk of committing cybercrime. We used questionnaires to collect self-report data on a large variety of cyber-offences, and on characteristics of both offline and online peers. We distinguished between cyber-dependent offending (i.e. offences requiring the use of online means) and cyber-enabled offending (i.e. offences existing in the offline world, but that can also be conducted online). We also included questions about common traditional types of offending. In addition, we asked the respondents about various individual characteristics and environmental factors and we collected detailed social network data on the respondents’ school friends. Our methods (for details, see Chapter 3) addressed various important limitations in previous research on cyberdelinquency (see Chapter 2).

Amsterdam: VU University Amsterdam/Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, 2022. 107p.

By H. Goudriaan.

Victim reports are the main source of information for the police regarding where crimes are committed, and also the basis for most subsequent actions of the criminal justice system. Therefore, the victims' decision to report to the police is crucial. However, much criminal victimization is not reported and, consequently, many offenders are never prosecuted. Why are some crimes reported and others not? Substantial differences in reporting are found across crime locations, neighborhoods and countries. In this book, a socio-ecological model of victims' decision-making is introduced which endeavors to explain these contextual differences in reporting. To empirically test the main hypotheses derived from this model, several data sources are used and different research strategies are employed, with which the effects of crime, victim and contextual factors on victims' reporting behavior are simultaneously analyzed. Factors constituting the context in which crime incidents take place (e.g. whether the location is in the private or public domain), as well as factors composing the neighborhood context (e.g. the neighborhood social cohesion) and – to a lesser extent – the country context in which victims reside, were found to play a role in victims's decision (not) to report.

Leiden: Leiden University, 2006. 213p.

By A.A.J. Blokland.

How does crime develop over the life course? And how do age, life circumstances, and prior offending affect this development? This thesis seeks to answer these two questions that are central to present day developmental and life course criminology. The research presented is based on the Criminal Career and Life course Study (CCLS), a longitudinal study covering the criminal careers of over 5,000 offenders from early adolescence to late adulthood. Employing a range of statistical techniques especially designed for analyzing longitudinal data, this research gives insight in issues such as the reality of life course persistent offenders, the influence of marriage and parenthood on offending, and the role of prior offending in generating stability and change in offending over time.

Leiden: Leiden University, 2005. 189p.