ABSTRACT
The concept of components is a good one. Money laundering schemes are a lot like computer systems, made with many individual parts and pieces, all designed to work together to process information. The most complicated money laundering schemes in history are ones that the organizers loaded up with all sorts of fancy component elements, like Swiss bank accounts, letters of credit, shell corporations, nominees, or front businesses. Just looking at the big picture, we’ve got little chance of unraveling such a rat’s nest, but if we isolate these components, addressing them as separate parts of the whole system, we may be able to reduce the problem to a manageable size.
