Crime scripting the criminal activities of money laundering – holistically

What is it about?

Money laundering is perhaps the pinnacle of all crime types’ – based on the principle that should illicit funds not be successfully laundered, the initial or ‘predicate offence’ which generated the funds fails in its primary purpose. This statement is substantiated if the predicate offence was executed solely for financial gain and the funds were to be used as if they were legitimately sourced. Yet, the pull push between ‘money launderers’ and law enforcement agencies around the world to manage money laundering has provided little comfort as to the successfulness of current preventative measures, especially if low figures relating to asset recovery or criminal confiscation are to be believed. Perhaps, now is the time to inspire a new generation of critical thinkers and researchers – those who commit to understanding how money laundering is now undertaken. To develop this idea to a point of plausible implementation, this article addresses the need to understand money laundering from a macro viewpoint, instead of the micro approaches frequently adopted in typology reports. By applying crime script analysis at a macro level, money laundering is exposed as an interconnect series of events, that unless studied in its entirety, fails to be comprehensively understood – leaving instead for preventative strategies to be misguided by irrelevant and idiosyncratic beliefs.

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