Typologies
The recognised patterns of financial crime onchain, what each looks like, and what innocent activity produces the same shape.
A typology is a named pattern of financial crime, described precisely enough that two people looking at the same case reach the same view about whether it fits. It makes an analyst’s private sense of what looks wrong explicit, which is what lets it be taught, argued with and pointed at in a filing.
Every page here is written to the same shape: why the pattern is treated as a concern, what it looks like, where to look in transfer history, rough magnitudes, and the innocent activity that produces the same picture. Read the last section first. Looking for signatures before you know the false positives primes you to find them.
In this section
What a typology is
What a good typology contains, and why a match is a hypothesis.
Structuring
Amounts clustered under a threshold, and the four ordinary things that look identical.
Layering through bridges and mixers
Hops, bridges and pooling services, and why distance alone proves little.
Mule networks
Accounts used by somebody else, and why the holder is often a victim.
Last checked against the product on .