Author(s)

F. R. Federici

Abstract

The application of data and text mining technologies in business intelligence solutions can give a great contribution to fighting money laundering and terrorist financing. These crimes are multiform and so laws are important, but they can’t be the only tool to contrast them. Money laundering is a well known offence, but it abandons classic methods in favour of new schemes, thanks to informatics: so called \“cyber-laundering”. Money laundering has assumed great relevance since September 11th 2001, because it shows many links to terrorist financing. Data and text mining can be useful in understanding links between people and suspicious transactions in order to track real money laundering and terrorist financing activities. There are American and European initiatives in which data/text mining and business intelligence assume a strategic rule. However, these applications have a critical aspect that involves privacy. Keywords: money laundering, terrorist financing, data and text mining, business intelligence. 1 Introduction Money laundering offers a lot of competitive advantages and, in particular, criminal organizations use \“cleaned” money in order to infiltrate themselves in the vital points of the lawful economy in order to strengthen their base of power and prestige. The recent evolution of IT technologies offers new opportunities to people who want to launder goods: this is cyberlaundering. Money laundering and financing of terrorism prosper also thanks to the complex financial systems and to nations with weak, ineffective and corrupted structures that should fight these two crimes (Schott [1]).

Keywords

money laundering, terrorist financing, data and text mining, business intelligence.