AML professionals know that stories of money laundering and learning of ways to combat it can be fascinating and informative reading material. Check out these 20 books for first-hand accounts of the criminals themselves as well as those that have dedicated their careers to fighting financial crime.
1. Anti-Money Laundering in a Nutshell: Awareness and Compliance for Financial Personnel and Business Managers
by Kevin Sullivan
Financial professionals looking for a concise, accessible, and practical guide to compliance with anti-money laundering regulations need look no further than this book. The author draws on a distinguished career as a former regulator, an AML agent, and consultant to discuss the ins and outs of money laundering and how readers can detect and prevent it from happening within their organisation.
2. Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World
by Bradley Hope and Tom Wright
This #1 international bestseller is "an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale" (Publishers Weekly), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history. This book tells the tale of Jho Low, who siphoned billions of dollars from an investment fund, right under the nose of global financial industry watchdogs. Low’s actions eventually set in motion fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude, that would come to symbolise the next great threat to the global financial system.
3. The Cleaner: The True Story of One of the World’s Most Successful Money Launderers
by Bruce Aitken
Dubbed, “Mr. Clean”, the author shares his story of how answering an ad in the newspaper turned into a globe-trotting lifestyle of moving money for some of the world’s most notorious characters that almost ended with a lifetime prison sentence.
4. Cleaning up the 'Net: An Action Plan to Combat the Use and Abuse of the Internet for Financial Crime
by Nigel Morris-Cotterill
This book claims to be the first ever end-to-end review of the internet with the aim to detect and prevent the abuse of the internet for financial crime and the support of terrorism. It helps to identify businesses that profit from fraudulent activity conducted over the internet and shows how these businesses can be recruited in the battle against financial crime, some of which is committed online.
5. Criminal Capital: How the Finance Industry Facilitates Crime
by Stephen Platt
Criminal Capital explores how financial structures and products are being used to evade proper scrutiny and enable criminal activity. Based on an analysis of financial methods that are frequently used by criminals, it deals with the widespread abuse of financial systems and discusses what actions can be taken to combat such misconduct.
6. Dirty Dealing: The Untold Truth about Global Money Laundering, International Crime and Terrorism
by Peter Lilley
Every year over US $1.5 trillion in "dirty" money is washed and moved around the world every year, much of it by organised crime syndicates grossing more than many developed economies. Readers learn about the frightening underworld of global money laundering and its filtration into legitimate business structures while undermining the economies of many countries, their financial systems, governments, and businesses.
7. Enhanced Due Diligence - The Complete BSA/AML Desktop Reference
by Howard Steiner (Author), Stephen L. Marini
AML professionals can look no further than this one-stop reference book on enhanced due diligence processes. This book clearly presents methods for customer risk profiling, policy and procedure development and the establishment of an adequate AML enhanced due diligence program. "The Desktop Reference" contains sample EDD reviews and everything you need to develop and maintain your EDD program, train your staff, and reduce regulatory risk. This book also teaches how to assess different customer risk types, how to conduct customer on-boarding EDD, and how to conduct ongoing EDD reviews.
8. Handbook of Anti–Money Laundering
by Dennis Cox
For practical guidance toward implementation of compliance requirements, this book explains the meaning of regulations to bank operations, and how the rules apply to real-life scenarios. With an international perspective, the reader gains a broad understanding of the anti-money laundering controls that are in place worldwide, with certain country-specific details discussed in-depth.
9. Know Your Customer (KYC) Policy: The Bank's Account Opening Procedures, Identity Verification Procedures and Customer Risk Assessment Procedures
by Patrick Kabamba
Bank professionals and students alike can look to this book to provide a comprehensive view of Know Your Customer “KYC” policies. The author draws upon a former career as a bank examiner and one of the leading authorities on banking risk management to summarise key components of adequate KYC policies to help the reader understand and master the KYC procedures within their own organisations.
10. The Laundrymen: Inside the World's Third Largest Business
by Jeffrey Robinson
This book reveals how money laundering is a massive global industry, with an estimated $100-300 billion worth of illicit funds. It discloses who the participants are, how they make billions disappear and why it is not necessarily in the interests of bankers, lawyers, and governments to stop them.
11. Mastering Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing: A compliance guide for practitioners
by Tim Parkman
A helpful compliance guide for AML practitioners, this helps AML professionals build an effective compliance framework for their organisations while discussing regulatory requirements and giving the reader access to practical online training materials that can be used within their own AML compliance programs.
12. Money Laundering and Illicit Financial Flows: Following the Money and Value Trails
by John A. Cassara
Written primarily from a law enforcement perspective, this book examines old and new money laundering methodologies and takes a hard look at our country’s AML track record. It exposes threats, enablers, and facilitators while making the case for an AML paradigm shift. Combining facts, straight-forward explanations, case studies, as well as the author’s personal experiences, views and commentary, this book is valuable to the public and private sectors, policy makers, as well as students and concerned citizens.
13. Money Laundering Prevention: Deterring, Detecting, and Resolving Financial Fraud
by Jonathan E. Turner
This book clearly outlines the essential information needed for business professionals to fully understand the money laundering process. It expertly provides an understanding of commonly used money laundering mechanisms, tools to detect issues, and action lists to recover hidden funds. Readers will come away with a better understanding of how to deter, detect, and resolve financial fraud cases internally.
14. Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World
by Oliver Bullough
This book is an investigative journalist's deep dive into the corrupt workings of the world's kleptocrats. Readers learn how the institutions of Europe and the United States have become money-laundering operations, attacking the foundations of many of the world's most stable countries, and what heroic activists are doing around the world to fight back.
15. Policing Financial Crime: Intelligence Strategy Implementation
by Petter Gottschalk
By combining insights into the broad variety of financial crime types and alternative law enforcement approaches, this book provides a unique insight into the growing local and global phenomena of financial crime. Response, regulation, and prevention of financial crime are all described in detail in terms of police intelligence strategy, intelligence information sources, and information systems.
16. The RegTech Book: The Financial Technology Handbook for Investors, Entrepreneurs and Visionaries in Regulation
by Janos Barberis, Douglas W. Arner and Ross P. Buckley
This is a comprehensive and groundbreaking guide to regulatory technology, offering insight into the disruption, innovation, and opportunities of technology in the regulatory and compliance sector. This book, the first of its kind, is providing a comprehensive and invaluable source of information aimed at corporates, regulators, compliance professionals, start-ups, and policymakers alike.
17. Research Handbook on International Financial Crime
by Barry Rider
Academics interested in criminology, law, as well as business and legal studies students will find this book to be an invaluable resource, as well as professionals in the legal, compliance, risk management, and law enforcement fields. With in-depth coverage on a national and international scale of topics such as fraud, financial and market governance, corruption, money laundering, and civil and criminal processes, this book delivers compendious guidance, as well as an unrelenting warning about embedded societal risks of insecurity and instability.
18. Secrecy World (Now the Major Motion Picture THE LAUNDROMAT): Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite
by Jake Bernstein
Written by a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, this book takes us inside the world revealed by the Panama Papers, a landscape of illicit money, political corruption, and fraud on a global scale. It offers a disturbing and sobering view of how the world really works and raises critical questions about financial and legal institutions we may once have trusted.
19. Trade-Based Money Laundering : The Next Frontier in International Money Laundering Enforcement
by John A. Cassara
If you are looking to learn more about trade-based money laundering, this book walks you through the signs and patterns to help you recognise it when it occurs, and how data and analytics can be used to detect it. Case studies from around the world highlight the real-life implications of the concepts and processes presented in the text, giving you a first-hand view of the mechanisms at work inside this expanding illegal market.
20. Treasury's War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare
by Juan Carlos Zarate
The author, a former senior Treasury and White House official, pulls back the curtain on the shadowy world of financial warfare. He tells the story of how a small, dedicated group of officials redefined the Treasury's role and used its unique powers, relationships, and reputation to apply financial pressure against America's enemies.
Whether for business or pleasure, these 20 books should be on your wish list for informative and interesting reading on all things anti-money laundering.
