It is the process of converting large amounts of money obtained by illegal means into clean money that can be traded in public activities.
Money laundering is also known as a method used to conceal and cover the sources through which money is earned. Through the use of illegal means of investment, and then their profits are invested in legitimate and legal activities.
Money laundering tools
There is a set of tools used by money laundering criminals, which range from simple and traditional methods to the use of technological means that help them in the money laundering process. Among the most popular money laundering tools are the following:
Illicit Trade: One of the most popular traditional money laundering tools, which uses all commercial channels to facilitate the money laundering process, and this trade includes illegal activities such as drugs, unlicensed weapons, and medicines that do not conform to specifications, and others.
The use of a group of financial institutions: they are institutions that contribute to facilitating money laundering operations by providing legal cover within the financial business and activities that they carry out, and thus contribute to converting illegal funds into laundered money.
Real estate leasing: It is the one that relies on the use of illegal capital in a group of real estate investment projects, which buy real estate and then lease it to individuals and institutions, and so the illegal money is replaced by legal money.
Loans: which are one of the most common means used in money laundering. As loans associated with the value of interest are approved, and as a result of this, illegal money is presented as amounts for loans, and then a percentage of the interest is collected on its value after a certain period of time has passed.
Internet technology: One of the modern means of money laundering, which relies on transferring illegal funds to any other financial investments such as stocks and bonds, through the use of websites that act as a financial intermediary, which facilitates the process of investing unwashed money.
Stages of money laundering Money laundering depends on a group of stages, namely:
Deposit: It is the first stage of money laundering, through which money laundering criminals rely on disposing of their money by transferring it to bank deposits in banks and investment financial institutions, which contributes to replacing it with clean and legal money.
Aggregation: It is the method used by money laundering criminals to collect it within a group of projects and financial investments that guarantee them adequate coverage for their illegal operations. Aggregation helps provide camouflage for money laundering operations.
Consolidation: The last stage of money laundering, through which the illegal funds are mixed with the legal funds, and thus the funds are mixed together, and it is difficult to identify them.
Economic results: are a set of results that lead to the emergence of a negative impact on the national economy of each country. Because of the role of money laundering in the decline in the use of healthy capital and its replacement with illegal money, some criminals seek to spread it within the economic market, which leads to a decline in economic development and financial investments, which negatively affects the value of local currencies compared to foreign currencies.
Political consequences: They are the results that are related to the threat to the political stability of states due to the use of laundered funds to finance illegal and criminal operations that may lead to the spread of a security and national threat to a country, and political corruption may spread through the use of money laundering and spreading it within the state sector.
Social outcomes: are the results that affect the whole societal environment. Money laundering criminals seek to spread all kinds of trade that provide the best assistance to them in order to launder their money easily, so they are keen to spread drugs among the youth category as one of the means that helps to increase the laundered money, and as a result of that, a great destruction of the basic structure of society.
Anti-money laundering Many countries of the world seek to combat money laundering by all available and possible ways and means; Therefore, most of these countries established criminal units specialized in this, and then issued a law specific to the penalties for the crime of money laundering, called the Anti-Money Laundering Law, which relies on monitoring this crime by imposing control over the transferred money for the purpose of exporting, depositing and investing, or Manipulating its value, converting it into other images and forms, or following any other process that entails concealing the source from which the money was acquired, and each of these operations, whether applied individually or collectively, is considered a form of money laundering, which It is classified as a crime punishable by law.