Money Laundering Detection using Machine Learning and Deep Learning

In recent years, money laundering activities have shown rapid progress and have indeed become the main concern for governments and financial institutions all over the world. As per recent statistics, $800 billion to $2 trillion is the estimated value of money laundered annually, in which $5 billion of the total is obtained from cryptocurrency money laundering. As per the financial action task force (FATF), the criminals may trade illegally obtained fiat money for the cryptocurrency. Accordingly, detecting and preventing illegal transactions becomes a serious threat to governments and it has been indeed challenging. To combat money laundering, especially in cryptocurrency, effective techniques for detecting suspicious transactions must be developed since the current preventive efforts are outdated. In fact, deep learning and machine learning techniques may provide novel methods to detect suspect currency movements. This study investigates the applicability of deep learning and machine learning techniques for anti-money laundering in cryptocurrency. The techniques employed in this study are Deep Neural Network (DNN), random forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbors(KNN), and Naive Bayes (NB) with the bitcoin elliptic dataset. It was observed that the DNN and random forest classifier have achieved the highest accuracy rate with promising findings in decreasing the false positives as compared to the other classifiers. In particular, the random forest classifier outperforms DNN and achieves an F1-score of 0.99%.