Senior Associate with extensive experience in anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing. Duncan also serves as a subject matter expert on numerous law enforcement and international projects for US government clients.
Illicit Supply Chains and Money Laundering
Since illicit supply chains need money to be sustained, each criminal enterprise has its own incentive to launder money. If a criminal enterprise is operating on a global scale, it needs to have a means to deposit profits or to take out funds to pay for operations. For this reason, global banking systems often find themselves in the middle of money laundering scams and have had to learn to react to and deal with these issues. All banks have instituted reporting requirements that make it easier to spot suspicious transactions to catch criminal enterprises, such as drug cartels, who are looking for ways to launder very large amounts of cash.
Terrorism, Human Trafficking, and Banks
Fighting the funding of terrorists presents its own unique challenges. Generally, terrorist funding is small and harder to detect. The London subway attacks, for example, were pulled off for less than $10,000; for 9/11, it was $400,000-500,000. Now that's a bit misleading since that’s only the cost of the attacks themselves; you have to factor in the cost of maintaining the terrorist infrastructure, but still the dollar amounts involved are much less than, say, drug cartels. In the Middle East and other parts of the world (including the US) there is hawala, a system of informal banks and money brokers that is much harder to track, and can be exploited by terrorists. Despite these challenges, there are red flags for terrorist financing that can be found Read more
Booz Allen's Role
The work that Booz Allen is doing in this area is based on bringing our government skills to bear on the commercial sector. Our niche is that we do the threat financing work on the government side of the equation and we’ve been able to apply these analytical techniques to commercials banks’ compliance needs. Read more
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