Researchers Seek to Catch Money Launderers By Building a Machine That Out-Thinks Them

Money laundering is, at its core, a magic trick. A drug cartel, a sanctions evader, a human trafficking ring all have the same problem: cash that cannot be spent without attracting attention. The solution is to run that money through enough transactions that by the time it surfaces in a legitimate account, nobody can trace where it started. Poof. Clean money.

Law enforcement has been chasing this trick for decades.

A team at USC’s Information Sciences Institute thinks the problem isn’t just resources or willpower. It’s imagination. And they’re building a system to fix that.

Getting Inside The Launderer’s Mind

The project is called GROAT — Generating Realistic Operations with Adaptable TTPs — and it is, in essence, a machine that aims to outsmart money laundering schemes by anticipating them and training systems to catch them.