Bureau Sets the Standard in Combating Money Mule Fraud at GFF 2024

The Money Mule Score is a groundbreaking solution developed by Bureau, an all-in-one identity platform for Compliance and Fraud decisions, to combat financial crime by identifying and preventing the misuse of financial systems through money mule accounts-those used by criminals to launder money or conduct illicit transactions. Utilizing advanced algorithms and comprehensive data analysis, Bureau’s Money Mule Score evaluates numerous risk factors, helping financial institutions safeguard their ecosystems from fraudulent activities.

While this product has already saved $9 million since its inception in April 2024 and has been adopted by 3 of the top Indian banks and several more in the testing phase, the financial capital got to see it in action at their booth during the Global Fintech festival held between 28th and 30th August in Mumbai.

The pressing need for such solutions was evident at the largest global fintech festival held at Mumbai. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his address, was quick to point out, “No matter what schemes are introduced, cyber fraudsters find a way,” underscoring the need to develop technology that can adapt and evolve as fraudsters evolve. In his address, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Shaktikanta Das, also emphasized the critical importance of real-time monitoring and regulatory compliance.

These calls-to-action all point to an urgent need for collaboration between all stakeholders, including banks, NBFCs, regulators, authorities, and most importantly tech providers that can stay ahead of evolving sophisticated fraud tactics undertaken by money mule recruiters.

Both the National Payments Corporation of India and the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub took to the stage to announce their upcoming projects aimed at fighting the mule pandemic. The central concern remained reducing the time needed to detect fraud.

“Most financial institutions today have rule-based engines that create lakhs of alerts for potentially fraudulent transactions. Then a team of analysts sift through them trying to separate the false positives. By the time this process is done, the money has already passed through an entire network of mule accounts. Reducing this time from transaction to detection is the need of the hour, and this can only be done with sophisticated AI technology,” Rajesh Bansal – CEO, RBiH during a panel discussion at GFF.

Bureau is one step ahead. Instead of a reactive approach, its technology aims to identify potential mule accounts proactively right at the time of onboarding.

Bureau has maintained its position as the first line of defense for financial institutions against mule activity purely because of its wide range of solutions, deep expertise in the field, and a holistic approach to eradicating money mules from the financial ecosystem.

Initially designed to detect mules during the onboarding process, Bureaus latest evolution of the Money Mule Score, introduces a more advanced method for detecting mules at onboarding as well as dormant mules. By leveraging link analysis that powers a proprietary Graph Identity Network, Bureaus unique solution now also excels in identifying mule accounts coming out of dormancy. These typically show signs of account takeovers by fraudsters, peddlers who sell their accounts, or the accounts of mule scam victims.

“Mules are such an invasive issue in the ecosystem, especially considering the frontline victims are always genuine customers, many of them belonging to the lower strata of the economy.” The dangers posed by mules post the account opening stage were highlighted by a spokesperson from a bank in India with $5 billion in deposits while speaking to the Bureau team at GFF.

Having already identified 300k mules across the ecosystem, Bureau has reinforced trust within the community and has helped protect genuine customers from engaging in financial services safely. Bureau’s score has a proven record of higher accuracy on True Positives of fraudulent actors, leading to a ~45% reduction in operation costs for its clients because of its ability to bring down the need for enhanced due diligence for account opening purposes.

Bureau’s CTO, Sandesh GS, during a GFF panel discussion, emphasized how, “With technology that passively operates in the background, we verify individuals in milliseconds, enabling seamless transactions. Our platform is able to process signals from over 600 million verified identities without disrupting the user experience.“

Bureau remains dedicated to its vision of enabling trust-driven digital interactions while preserving a seamless user experience for genuine customers.