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The Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF), which is recognized as the international standard setter for Anti-money Laundering (AML) efforts, defines the term "money laundering" briefly as "the processing of criminal proceeds to disguise their illegal origin" in order to "legitimize" the ill-gotten gains of crime.
Money laundering is the process of illegally concealing the origin of money obtained from illicit activities (often known as dirty money) such as drug trafficking, underground sex work, terrorism, corruption, embezzlement, and treason, and converting the funds into a seemingly legitimate source, usually through a front organization.
Some examples include human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling, illegal arms dealing, terrorism, and cybercrime. Although it is impossible to precisely gauge transnational crime, the Millennium Project, an international think tank, assembled statistics on several aspects of transnational crime in 2009: [18]
A well-known early example of money laundering using cryptocurrencies is Silk Road. Shut down in 2013 with its founder Ross Ulbricht indicted for among other counts a money laundering conspiracy, the website was used for several illicit activities including money laundering solely using Bitcoin as a form of payment.
Singer pleaded guilty on March 12, 2019, in the U.S. District Court in Boston to four felony counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and obstruction of justice for alerting a number of subjects to the investigation after he began cooperating with the government. [79]
The World Bank has a website that provides policy advice and best practices to governments and the private sector on anti–money laundering issues. [26] The Basel AML Index is an independent annual ranking that assesses the risk of money laundering and terrorist financing around the world. [27]
Examples of transnational crimes include: human trafficking, people smuggling, smuggling/trafficking of goods (such as arms trafficking and drug trafficking and illegal animal and plant products and other goods prohibited on environmental grounds (e.g. banned ozone depleting substances), sex slavery, terrorism offences, torture and apartheid.
Third, financial transactions conducted by the kleptocrat in a Western country complete the integration of the funds. Once a kleptocrat has purchased an asset this can then be resold, providing a defensible albeit illegal origin of the funds. This is known as money laundering and is illegal throughout the Western world.