With the COVID-19 epidemic spurring an increase in cybercrime, compliance professionals are being given a chance to test their detection skills by playing the world’s first money laundering monitoring game.
Real-time transaction monitoring
‘Catch Them If You Can’ is a real-time transaction monitoring game, offering players the chance to showcase their expertise and identify suspicious transactions and catch criminals, while also minimising false positives.
‘Catch Them If You Can’ highlights the difficulties that compliance officers face fighting financial crime"
Working against the clock, financial crime fighters choose one of three financial crime scenarios – drug dealing, wildlife trafficking, and bribery and corruption. They then get the chance to use their skills to neutralise the threat of the specific crime and post their score on the game’s leaderboard.
“We built ‘Catch Them If You Can’ to replicate and highlight the difficulties that compliance officers face fighting financial crime today,” said Charles Delingpole, Founder & CEO of ComplyAdvantage.
Modifying AML/CFT approach in COVID-19
Charles adds, “At a time when criminals are focused on finding new opportunities to generate illegal funds, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to successfully identify money laundering behaviour while maintaining an effective and efficient compliance department.”
With the coronavirus triggering a dramatic shift in both consumer and criminal behaviours, financial authorities around the world have to speedily adjust their AML/CFT approach to account for new patterns of conduct and better address emerging money laundering risks.
Countering growing money laundering risks
“Firms should be familiar with the ways in which money launderers and other criminals are exploiting the pandemic and how their AML/CFT compliance processes might need to change to manage the elevated threat,” said Charles Delingpole.
He adds, “It’s no longer as easy to identify what normal behaviour looks like, making it more difficult for compliance teams to discern between legal and suspicious activities. Our hope is that ‘Catch Them If You Can’ will start a dialogue among players about the need for agility and the best way they can make changes to their systems in light of current events.”
