A systematic review of anti-money laundering systems literature: Exploring the efficacy of machine learning and deep learning integration

Authors

  • Nadia Husnaningtyas Master of Accounting Program, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia
  • Ghalizha Failazufah Hanin Department of Accounting, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia
  • Totok Dewayanto Department of Accounting, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Diponegoro, Semarang, Indonesia
  • Muhammad Fahad Malik Department of Law, Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, RahimYar Khan, Pakistan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31106/jema.v20i1.20602

Keywords:

Systematic Literature Review, Anti-Money Laundering, Financial Security, Machine Learning, Deep Learning

Abstract

Money laundering is a complex issue with global impact, leading to the increased adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) to bolster anti-money laundering (AML) measures. AI, with machine learning and deep learning as key drivers, has become an essential enhancement for AML strategies. Recognizing this emerging trend, this study embarks on a systematic literature review, aiming to provide novel insights into the implementation, effectiveness, and challenges of these sophisticated computational techniques within AML frameworks. A critical analysis of 26 selected studies published from 2018 to 2023 highlights the essential role of machine learning and deep learning in identifying money laundering schemes. Notably, the decision tree algorithm stands out as the most commonly utilized technique. The combined use of both learning models has proven to significantly increase the effectiveness of AML systems in detecting suspicious financial patterns. However, the optimization of these advanced methods is still constrained by issues related to data complexity, quality, and access.

References

Ahen, F. (2022). International mega-corruption Inc.: the structural violence against sustainable development. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 18(2), 178–200. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-04-2018-0035

Ahmed, S. A. (2017). Practical application of anti-money laundering requirements in Bangladesh an insight into the disparity between anti-money laundering methods and their effectiveness based on resources and infrastructure. Journal of Money Laundering Control, 20(4), 428–450. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMLC-09-2016-0042

Ai, L. (2012). “Rule‐based but risk‐oriented” approach for combating money laundering in Chinese financial sectors. Journal of Money Laundering Control, 15(2), 198–209. https://doi.org/10.1108/13685201211218225

Albrecht, C., Duffin, K. M., Hawkins, S., & Morales Rocha, V. M. (2019). The use of cryptocurrencies in the money laundering process. Journal of Money Laundering Control, 22(2), 210-216. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMLC-12-2017-0074

Alexandre, C., & Balsa, J. (2015). A multiagent based approach to money laundering detection and prevention. ICAART 2015 - 7th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings, 1, 230–235. https://doi.org/10.5220/0005281102300235

Alkhalili, M., Qutqut, M. H., & Almasalha, F. (2021). Investigation of Applying Machine Learning for Watch-List Filtering in Anti-Money Laundering. IEEE Access, 9, 18481–18496. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3052313

Alldridge, P. (2008). Money laundering and globalization. Journal of Law and Society, 35(4), 437–463. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2008.00446.x.

Alloghani, M., Al-Jumeily, D., Mustafina, J., Hussain, A., & Aljaaf, A. J. (2020). A systematic review on supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms for data science. Supervised and unsupervised learning for data science, 3-21. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22475-2_1

Alotibi, J., Almutanni, B., Alsubait, T., Alhakami, H., & Baz, A. (2022). Money Laundering Detection using Machine Learning and Deep Learning. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 13(10), 732–738. https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2022.0131087

Alsuwailem, A. A. S., & Saudagar, A. K. J. (2020). Anti-money laundering systems: a systematic literature review. Journal of Money Laundering Control, 23(4), 833–848. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMLC-02-2020-0018

Ashtiani, M. N., & Raahmei, B. (2023). News-based intelligent prediction of financial markets using text mining and machine learning: A systematic literature review. Expert Systems with Applications, 119509.

AUSTRAC. (2011). Money laundering in Australia 2011. https://www.austrac.gov.au/business/how-comply-guidance-and-resources/guidance-resources/money-laundering-australia-2011

Bhanarkar, O. (2012). How does money laundering and terror financing affect the economy? RegTech Times. https://regtechtimes.com/impact-of-money-laundering-on-economy-of-country/

Bishop, C. M., & Nasrabadi, N. M. (2006). Pattern recognition and machine learning (Vol. 4, No. 4, p. 738). New York: Springer.

Bjelajac, Z., & Bajac, M. B. (2022). Blockchain technology and money laundering. Law Theory & Prac., 39, 21.

Caglayan, M., & Bahtiyar, S. (2022). Money Laundering Detection with Node2Vec. Gazi University Journal of Science, 35(3), 854–873. https://doi.org/10.35378/gujs.854725

Canhoto, A. (2021). Leveraging machine learning in the global fight against money laundering and terrorism financing: an affordances perspective. Journal of Business Research, 131, 441–452.

Chen, Z., Soliman, W. M., Nazir, A., & Shorfuzzaman, M. (2021). Variational Autoencoders and Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks for Improving the Anti-Money Laundering Process. IEEE Access, 9, 83762–83785. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3086359

Chitimira and, & Ncube, M. (2021). Towards Ingenious Technology and the Robust Enforcement of Financial Markets Laws to Curb Money Laundering in Zimbabwe. PER / PELJ, 24. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3704279

Clarke, A. E. (2021). Is there a commendable regime for combatting money laundering in international business transactions? Journal of Money Laundering Control, 24(1), 163–176. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMLC-05-2020-0057

Cooley, A. and Sharman, J. (2015). Blurring the line between licit and illicit: transnational corruption networks in Central Asia and beyond. Central Asian Survey, 34(1), 11–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2015.1010799

Eldawlatly, A., Alshehri, H., Alqahtani, A., Ahmad, A., Al-Dammas, F., & Marzouk, A. (2018). Appearance of Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome as research question in the title of articles of three different anesthesia journals: A pilot study. Saudi Journal of Anaesthesia, 12(2), 283–286. https://doi.org/10.4103/sja.SJA_767_17

FATF. (2020). Outcomes FATF Plenary, 20-21 October 2022. FATF. https://www.fatf-gafi.org/en/publications/Fatfgeneral/Outcomes-fatf-plenary-october-2022.html

FATF. (2022). The FATF Recommendations. FATF. https://www.fatf-gafi.org/en/publications/Fatfrecommendations/Fatf-recommendations.html.

FinCen. (2023). FinCEN Combats Ransomware. Https://Www.Fincen.Gov/Fincen-Combats-Ransomware.

FINTRAC. (2023). Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada. Https://Fintrac-Canafe.Canada.ca/Intro-Eng.

Gupta, A., Dwivedi, D. N., Shah, J., & Jain, A. (2022). Data quality issues leading to sub optimal machine learning for money laundering models. Journal of Money Laundering Control, 25(3), 551–555. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMLC-05-2021-0049

Han, J., Huang, Y., Liu, S., & Towey, K. (2020). Artificial intelligence for anti-money laundering: a review and extension. Digital Finance, 2(3–4), 211–239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42521-020-00023-1

Hinton, G. E., & Salakhutdinov, R. R. (2006). Reducing the Dimensionality of Data with Neural Networks. Science, 313(5786), 504–507.

Hu, C., Li, R., Li, C., Miao, H., Yang, Z., & Zhang, T. (2022, September). Big Data Analysis for Anti-Money Laundering: A Case of Open Source Greenplum Application. In International Conference on Web Information Systems and Applications (pp. 638-645). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Isolauri, E. A., & Ameer, I. (2022). Money laundering as a transnational business phenomenon: a systematic review and future agenda. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 19(3), 426–468. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-10-2021-0088

Kafteranis, D., & Turksen, U. (2022). Art of Money Laundering with Non-Fungible Tokens: A myth or reality?. European Law Enforcement Research Bulletin, 22(6), 23-31.

Kanamori, S., Abe, T., Ito, T., Emura, K., Wang, L., Yamamoto, S., Phong, L. T., Abe, K., Kim, S., Nojima, R., Ozawa, S., & Moriai, S. (2022). Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning for Detecting Fraudulent Financial Transactions in Japanese Banks. Journal of Information Processing, 30, 789–795. https://doi.org/10.2197/ipsjjip.30.789

Ketenci, U. G., Kurt, T., Onal, S., Erbil, C., Akturkoglu, S., & Ilhan, H. S. (2021). A Time-Frequency Based Suspicious Activity Detection for Anti-Money Laundering. IEEE Access, 9, 59957–59967. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3072114

Kitchenham, B. A., & Charters, S. (2007). Guidelines for performing Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering. Technical Report EBSE 2007- 001. Keele University and Durham University Joint Report.

Labanca, D., Primerano, L., Markland-Montgomery, M., Polino, M., Carminati, M., & Zanero, S. (2022). Amaretto: An Active Learning Framework for Money Laundering Detection. IEEE Access, 10, 41720–41739. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3167699

Lawrencia, C., & Ce, W. (2019, August). Fraud detection decision support system for Indonesian financial institution. In 2019 International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech) (Vol. 1, pp. 389-394). IEEE.

Le-Khac, N. A., Markos, S., O'Neill, M., Brabazon, A., & Kechadi, T. (2016). An efficient search tool for an anti-money laundering application of an multi-national bank's dataset. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.02031.

Leite, G. S., Albuquerque, A. B., & Pinheiro, P. R. (2019). Application of technological solutions in the fight against money laundering-A systematic literature review. Applied Sciences (Switzerland), 9(22). https://doi.org/10.3390/app9224800

Li, K. (2020). Why is the policing weak in China? The mindset of police officers in money laundering cases. Police Practice and Research, 21(6), 624-639. https://doi.org/10.1080/15614263.2019.1644179

Lokanan, M. E. (2019). Data mining for statistical analysis of money laundering transactions. Journal of Money Laundering Control, 22(4), 753–763. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMLC-03-2019-0024

Lopes, D. D., Cunha, B. R. d., Martins, A. F., Gonçalves, S., Lenzi, E. K., Hanley, Q. S., Perc, M., & Ribeiro, H. V. (2022). Machine learning partners in criminal networks. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20025-w

Magomedov, S., Pavelyev, S., Ivanova, I., Dobrotvorsky, A., Khrestina, M., & Yusubaliev, T. (2018). Anomaly detection with machine learning and graph databases in fraud management. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 9(11), 33–38. https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2018.091104

Masrom, S., Tarmizi, M. A., Halid, S., Rahman, R. A., Abd Rahman, A. S., & Ibrahim, R. (2023). Machine learning in predicting anti-money laundering compliance with protection motivation theory among professional accountants. International Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences, 10(7), 48–53. https://doi.org/10.21833/ijaas.2023.07.007

Mubalaike, A. M., & Adali, E. (2018, September). Deep learning approach for intelligent financial fraud detection system. In 2018 3rd International Conference on Computer Science and Engineering (UBMK) (pp. 598-603). IEEE.

Mukherjee, A., Singh, S., & Gaurav, K. (2019). Financial fraud detection using machine learning techniques: A systematic literature review. Journal of Information Security and Applications, 50, 1–25.

Naveed, N., Munawar, S., & Usman, A. (2023a). Intelligent Anti-Money Laundering Fraud Control Using Graph-Based Machine Learning Model for the Financial Domain. Journal of Cases on Information Technology, 25(1). https://doi.org/10.4018/JCIT.316665

Naveed, N., Munawar, S., & Usman, A. (2023b). Intelligent Anti-Money Laundering Fraud Control Using Graph-Based Machine Learning Model for the Financial Domain. Journal of Cases on Information Technology, 25(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.4018/JCIT.316665

Pavlidis, G. (2023). Deploying artificial intelligence for anti-money laundering and asset recovery: the dawn of a new era. Journal of Money Laundering Control, 26(7), 155–166. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMLC-03-2023-0050

Pocher, N., Zichichi, M., Merizzi, F., Shafiq, M. Z., & Ferretti, S. (2022). Detecting Anomalous Cryptocurrency Transactions: an AML/CFT Application of Machine Learning-based Forensics. Electronic Markets. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-023-00654-3

Ruchay, A., Feldman, E., Cherbadzhi, D., & Sokolov, A. (2023). The Imbalanced Classification of Fraudulent Bank Transactions Using Machine Learning. Mathematics, 11(13), 2862. https://doi.org/10.3390/math11132862

Ruiz, E. P., & Angelis, J. (2022). Combating money laundering with machine learning – applicability of supervised-learning algorithms at cryptocurrency exchanges. Journal of Money Laundering Control, 25(4), 766–778. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMLC-09-2021-0106

Salehi, A., Ghazanfari, M., & Fathian, M. (2017). Data mining techniques for anti money laundering. International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, 12(20), 10084–10094. https://doi.org/10.5120/ijca2016910953

Savage, D., Wang, Q., Chou, P., Zhang, X., & Yu, X. (2016). Detection of money laundering groups using supervised learning in networks. http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00708

Shahbazi, Z., & Byun, Y. C. (2022). Machine Learning-Based Analysis of Cryptocurrency Market Financial Risk Management. IEEE Access, 10, 37848–37856. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3162858

Singh, C., & Lin, W. (2020). Can artificial intelligence, RegTech and CharityTech provide effective solutions for anti-money laundering and counter-terror financing initiatives in charitable fundraising. Journal of Money Laundering Control, 24(3), 464–482. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMLC-09-2020-0100

Soltani, R., Nguyen, U.T., Yang, Y., Faghani, M., Yagoub, A. and An, A. (2016). A new algorithm for money laundering detection based on structural similarity. 2016 IEEE 7th Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics and Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON), 1–7.

Song, J., & Gu, Y. (2023). HBTBD: A Heterogeneous Bitcoin Transaction Behavior Dataset for Anti-Money Laundering. Applied Sciences (Switzerland), 13(15). https://doi.org/10.3390/app13158766

Suresh, C., Reddy, K. T., & Sweta, N. (2016). A Hybrid Approach for Detecting Suspicious Accounts in Money Laundering Using Data Mining Techniques. International Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science, 8(5), 37–43. https://doi.org/10.5815/ijitcs.2016.05.04

Syed Mustapha Nazri, S.N.F., Zolkaflil, S. and Omar, N. (2019). Mitigating financial leakages through effective money laundering investigation. Managerial Auditing Journal, 34(2), 189–207.

Teichmann, F., & Falker, M. C. (2020). Money laundering through cryptocurrencies. In Artificial Intelligence: Anthropogenic Nature vs. Social Origin (pp. 500-511). Springer International Publishing.

Zhang, Y., & Trubey, P. (2019). Machine Learning and Sampling Scheme: An Empirical Study of Money Laundering Detection. Computational Economics, 54(3), 1043–1063. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10614-018-9864-z

Downloads

Published

2023-03-25

How to Cite

Nadia Husnaningtyas, Ghalizha Failazufah Hanin, Totok Dewayanto, & Muhammad Fahad Malik. (2023). A systematic review of anti-money laundering systems literature: Exploring the efficacy of machine learning and deep learning integration. JEMA: Jurnal Ilmiah Bidang Akuntansi Dan Manajemen, 20(1), 91–116. https://doi.org/10.31106/jema.v20i1.20602