Cyberpayments And Money Laundering

At the request of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), an agency of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, RAND conducted and analyzed a strategic decisionmaking exercise to examine money laundering concerns raised by the deployment of cyberpayment systems. Participants in the exercise represented the Executive Branch, the cyberpayment and banking industries, Congress, and academia. The tasks of the exercise were to (1) describe current cyberpayment concepts and systems; (2) identify an initial set of cyberpayment characteristics of particular concern to law enforcement and payment system regulators; (3) identify major issues cyberpayment policies will need to address; and (4) array appropriate recommendations to address potential system abuse in a set of proposed action plans. While it is premature to draft a comprehensive regulatory regime for cyberpayment products, participants agreed that prompt collaborative action by industry and government--and among governments--is needed. Dialogue on standards, regulatory transparency, and vigorous surveillance can prevent the criminal exploitation of cyberpayment system vulnerabilities.

At the request of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), an agency of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, RAND conducted and analyzed a strategic decisionmaking exercise to examine money laundering concerns raised by the deployment of cyberpayment systems. Participants in the exercise represented the Executive Branch, the cyberpayment and banking industries, Congress, and academia. The tasks of the exercise were to (1) describe current cyberpayment concepts and systems; (2) identify an initial set of cyberpayment characteristics of particular concern to law enforcement and payment system regulators; (3) identify major issues cyberpayment policies will need to address; and (4) array appropriate recommendations to address potential system abuse in a set of proposed action plans. While it is premature to draft a comprehensive regulatory regime for cyberpayment products, participants agreed that prompt collaborative action by industry and government--and among governments--is needed. Dialogue on standards, regulatory transparency, and vigorous surveillance can prevent the criminal exploitation of cyberpayment system vulnerabilities.

How should nations and financial institutions begin to address the thorny problems posed by the vulnerability of Cyberpayments, Internet banking, and Internet gambling to abuse by money launderers and other perpetrators of financial crime?

Tracking funding is a critical part of the fight against terrorism and as the threat has escalated, so has the development of financial intelligence units (FIUs) designed to investigate suspicious transactions. Terrorist Financing, Money Laundering, and Tax Evasion: Examining the Performance of Financial Intelligence Units provides a thorough analy

It is still easy to underestimate how much the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War?--and then the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001?--transformed the task of American foreign and defense policymaking. In place of predictability (if a sometimes terrifying predictability), the world is now very unpredictable. In place of a single overriding threat and benchmark by which all else could be measured, a number of possible threats have arisen, not all of them states. In place of force-on-force engagements, U.S. defense planners have to assume "asymmetric" threats?--ways not to defeat U.S. power but to render it irrelevant. This book frames the challenges for defense policy that the transformed world engenders, and it sketches new tools for dealing with those challenges?--from new techniques in modeling and gaming, to planning based on capabilities rather than threats, to personnel planning and making use of "best practices" from the private sector.