What is it about?
This study examines how money launderers may adapt when repeated transactions lead to increased scrutiny. The model shows that stronger monitoring of recurring activity can make offenders transact less often, while concentrating funds into fewer and potentially larger transactions.
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Why is it important?
A decline in suspicious transaction numbers may appear to indicate successful deterrence. However, it may instead reflect a change in how laundering is organized. Assessing AML effectiveness therefore requires examining transaction frequency, value, persistence and channel shifts together—not transaction counts alone.
Perspectives
Modern AML systems increasingly evaluate patterns of activity rather than isolated transactions. This changes offenders’ incentives. When repeated interaction with a bank becomes costly, money laundering may shift from many smaller transactions towards fewer, larger and more organizationally demanding operations. The findings suggest that banks, supervisors and law-enforcement authorities should avoid treating declining alert or transaction volumes as evidence of reduced crime. Monitoring should connect activity across time, accounts, institutions and beneficial owners, while also considering whether stronger controls in regulated banks displace activity towards less transparent channels.
Endre Jo Reite
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Recurrence, scale, and risk-based monitoring in money laundering: Temporal displacement under cumulative enforcement, Journal of Economic Criminology, June 2026, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.jeconc.2026.100221.
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