The fight against money laundering in North America

Abstract

The process of converting illicitly acquired funds into apparently legal benefits, is known ad money laundering. Even doe the first evidences of money laundering can be tracked to Chinese merchants two centuries ago, the term was coined around the 1920’s when Chicago gangsters used a laundromat business to inject their earnings from gambling and illegal alcohol dealing. There are traditionally three steps involved in money laundering, which are placement, layering, and integration; each of those steps may have different modalities and involvement with different kinds of assets of businesses. Placement can be achieved by injecting funds to a business, layering by moving around the money on different countries and bank accounts, and integration by redeeming an insurance policy. Currently the variety of methods and modalities of money laundering is vast, and depending the country and financial framework one method can be more appealing to criminals than another. Canada, México and the United States of America share an enormous economic, financial, political and commercial relationship, and three countries together represent the world’s biggest GDP. These countries share also problems of criminality and money laundering; however, their particular situation requires tailored regulations to fight interrelated problems that are highly relevant to each country. The three legislations are compliant with the Financial Actions Task Force, but have a different focus and difficulties to implement regulations and prosecute offenders.