For criminals, successfully dealing with the proceeds of their illicit activity presents a thorny problem. The money they steal must at least appear to be legitimately sourced; otherwise, spending it could lead to their capture. A century ago, for example, Al Capone bought and operated legitimate businesses and routed the proceeds of his bootlegging empire through those. His modern-day counterparts often do the same or take their ill-gotten gains in the form of cryptocurrency that can be run through a “mixer” to hide the money’s origins.
Those strategies have flaws. Capone was famously taken down on tax evasion charges because he failed to successfully hide all of the money he was laundering. The FBI and its international counterparts have had notable success in tracking cryptocurrency crime back to its source and recovering funds in cryptocurrency form. Many criminals turn, instead, to the use of “money mules” to help launder the proceeds of their crimes. This makes money mule detection a key law enforcement priority, one that can be approached effectively through the use of modern investigative tools and techniques. Here, we explore just that.
Three Kinds of Money Mules
The FBI identifies three distinct kinds of money mules, each of which represents different challenges and opportunities for law enforcement agencies investigating them.
Complicit Money Mules
“Complicit” money mules are people who are associated with criminals or are a part of the criminal organization themselves. Opening accounts using false identities and using those accounts to move and launder funds is their role (or one of their roles) within the organization.
Banks and fintechs (app-based quasi-banks) have internal tools for mule account detection, though criminals and financial institutions play a continual game of cat-and-mouse over the types of activity that will be flagged as suspicious. Investigating complicit money mules can be challenging for LEAs, except when called in by the bank. On the upside, once a suspect is identified, it may be possible to turn the mule and gain insider information about the rest of the crime ring.
Unwitting Money Mules
Unwitting money mules are ordinary, law-abiding citizens who are duped into carrying out money laundering through a scam. This often takes the form of a romance scam, though job-related scams also potentially lead to money laundering. These schemes create multiple victims: those who originally lost money to the criminals and the multiple unwitting mules who are exploited (and exposed to potential prosecution) in order to “crowdsource” the illicit funds in portions small enough not to trigger investigation by the bank.
These mules are very often recruited through social media, dating apps, and chat apps, all of which represent potential avenues of exploration for investigators. As victims themselves, these mules (once found) are usually quick to cooperate with law enforcement.
Witting Money Mules
These mules fall between the first two. They may originally be recruited as unwitting mules or may, from the start, be tempted by the offer of significant payments in exchange for doing something they know or suspect to be shady. However, their initial recruitment was handled, they knowingly continue their activity, although they know (or should know) that they’re contributing to illegal activity.
Like unwitting mules, they are often recruited through social media, which opens up potential avenues of investigation. Their willingness to cooperate with law enforcement is unpredictable due to their own complicity. They may turn easily if offered a plea deal in exchange for information, or may stonewall investigators from fear or an impulse to self-protection.
Top Tips for Money Mule Detection
The three types of money mules are all susceptible to detection in different ways. A common thread is the need for quality intelligence, whether to detect potential mules, to identify their recruiters, or to gather evidence that leads to a conviction. Here are just a few tips (think of them as discussion starters) explaining how your investigators might crack cases open and generate successful prosecutions and convictions.
1. Drill Down on Identity After Referrals From the Banking Industry
When a financial institution flags an account holder through its mule account detection algorithms, establishing whether that account holder’s identity is legitimate is a strong opening move. Unwitting and most witting mules use their genuine identities to open these accounts, so investigating those is straightforward.
Complicit mules, on the other hand, may use an unconnected real person’s identity (secured directly or indirectly through identity theft), or a “synthetic identity” crafted from pieces of identity stolen from multiple victims. Searching the name and address (and more sensitive info, such as the SSN) of the suspected mule account’s owner may lead to a single victim of identity theft or to multiple names in the case of a synthetic identity. This identifies the suspect as a complicit mule.
2. Establish a Detailed Picture of the Suspected Mule
When a suspected money mule has been identified, assessing the degree of the mule’s involvement is the next step. Here, open-source intelligence – most notably, social media intelligence or SOCMINT – comes to the fore. Searching the mule through Spokeo for Law Enforcement may uncover social media accounts belonging to the suspected mule, even if they are held under anonymous/pseudonymous usernames. Investigators can seek out those accounts and use them to assess their level of involvement in criminal activity.
Those whose posts and connections are all thoroughly mundane are likely unwitting mules. Those showing evidence of a sudden improvement in their finances (less talk of bills and more of new purchases, visual evidence of new and better belongings) are more likely to be witting mules.
3. Expand Your Net to Include a Mule’s Contacts
A potential mule’s contacts can steer the next steps of your investigation. In the case of an unwitting or witting mule, the original contact was likely made on social media. Reviewing their contacts and their interactions with others can narrow down the potential recruiters to a relatively small handful of other accounts. Searching those usernames with Spokeo, in turn, may turn up one of two things: either perfectly ordinary accounts of people unlikely to be your suspect or shady accounts with little personal content and photos. The latter are much likelier to be recruiters or scammers.
Criminals often recycle their “sales pitch” and photos between multiple platforms and multiple victims, changing only the names used. Searching public posts on the major networks for recurring phrases and using Google’s reverse image search to locate other uses of the same images can help identify other victims and broaden the scope of a case. The more victims (mules) you’re able to identify, the greater the likelihood that one of them can furnish a key detail.
4. Work Your Mules to Uncover Additional Avenues of Investigation
Keeping the dollar amounts per transaction under the $10,000 limit that triggers additional scrutiny is crucial, so moving large sums requires large numbers of mules. Unwitting mules in this scenario are victims, and witting mules are easily persuaded to consider themselves victims, and both can be persuaded to expose conversations with their handlers through private messaging, texts, or encrypted messaging apps, none of which would otherwise be accessible without subpoenas or search warrants.
At a minimum, those messages may uncover personal details that can be used to corroborate an identification once you have a suspect (it’s hard to fabricate an entire persona from scratch, especially when cultivating multiple victims, and real-world details tend to creep in). At best, investigators may be able to pose as the victim and “play” the recruiter well enough to secure an arrest and conviction.
Building a Detailed View of the Suspect
Crafting a comprehensively detailed view of the suspected mule as a person – both online and offline – is crucial to establishing whether they are acting as a mule and then whether they’re doing so willingly or as the victim of a scam. While LEAs typically have access to high-quality data, including regulated data, from government and law enforcement sources, there are many gaps in that data that can best be filled through the use of open-source intelligence (OSINT) and especially social media intelligence (SOCMINT).
In an ideal scenario, investigators would have a tool at their fingertips that
- Is easy to use, even for tech-averse investigators.
- Provides access to regulated and open-source data, all in one search.
- Interacts with other data sources through a powerful application programming interface (API), to create unified reports and streamlined inputs for data-analysis tools.
Spokeo provides all of those things, equipping LEAs to aggressively pursue money mule accounts and the people behind them. Its unusually deep and powerful social media search, in particular, is a game-changing tool.
To learn more about how Spokeo for Law Enforcement can upgrade your investigative efforts, arrange a demonstration, or discuss a no-cost trial of the product, please reach out to our team through the contact information on our Law Enforcement page.
Sources
FBI Archive: Solving Scarface: How the Law Finally Caught Up to Al Capone
Federal Bureau of Investigation: Tornado Cash Co-Founders Accused of Helping Cybercriminals Launder Stolen Crypto
US Attorney’s Office, District of Columbia: United States Seizes More Than $6 Million in Alleged Proceeds of a Crypto-Confidence Scheme
AARP: Romance Scammer Turns Woman into Unwitting “Money Mule”
Google Search Help: Search With an Image on Google