Towards Learning to Discover Money Laundering Sub-Network in Massive Transaction Network

Abstract

Anti-money laundering (AML) systems play a critical role in safeguarding global economy. As money laundering is considered as one of the top group crimes, there is a crucial need to discover money laundering sub-network behind a particular money laundering transaction for a robust AML system. However, existing rule-based methods for money laundering sub-network discovery is heavily based on domain knowledge and may lag behind the modus operandi of launderers. Therefore, in this work, we first address the money laundering sub-network discovery problem with a neural network based approach, and propose an AML framework AMAP equipped with an adaptive sub-network proposer. In particular, we design an adaptive sub-network proposer guided by a supervised contrastive loss to discriminate money laundering transactions from massive benign transactions. We conduct extensive experiments on real-word datasets in AliPay of Ant Group. The result demonstrates the effectiveness of our AMAP in both money laundering transaction detection and money laundering sub-network discovering. The learned framework which yields money laundering sub-network from massive transaction network leads to a more comprehensive risk coverage and a deeper insight to money laundering strategies.