Money laundering

Money laundering is among the most common financial crimes that negatively affect countries' economies and hurt their social and political relations. With the increasing growth of e-banking and the increase in electronic financial transactions, the identification of money laundering methods and behaviors has become more complex; because money launderers, by accessing the Internet and using new technologies, find new ways to legalize their illegal income. Although many efforts have been made to identify suspected cases of money laundering and fight against this financial crime, little success has been achieved in this regard, especially in developing countries. Hence, this study tries to identify the risk factors involved in money laundering in banking transactions. To this end, multiple attribute decision-making methods, such as the Shannon entropy method, hierarchical analysis, and two-level fuzzy hierarchical analysis, have been used to assess and score the risk of various transactions in money laundering. The results indicated that the highest risk of money laundering was in the POS transactions.

In a democratic society, the fight against terrorism is based almost exclusively on crime prevention. If the prevention of terrorism is addressed properly, there will be no need for a military strike because terrorists will not have the opportunity to carry out their goals and activities. One of the most related aspects of terrorism is the financing of its perpetrators and their activities. Accordingly, the present article aims to investigate the prevention of terrorist financing from the perspective of global criminology. Given that crime prevention is a significant component of criminal policy, which is aimed to limit the opportunity for perpetrators by making impossible or difficult the possibility of their criminal activities, the focus of preventive measures places on non-punitive sanctions or methods. However, criminalization of terrorism and its financing could be defined as a preventive measures based on penal mechanism, called ‘reactive prevention’. Consequently, an ideal pattern for international prevention of terrorism and terrorist financing is to promote the legislation within the domestic legal systems of all countries in the international community. By recognizing internationally-recognized norms and standards and implementing them in countries’ domestic legal systems, it could be expected that terrorism and terrorist financing would be prevented in a more effective manner.  

Money laundering refers to the concealment of the illegal origin of proceeds obtained from criminal activities, making it appear as if they stem from legal sources. This phenomenon has numerous negative impacts on various economic and social spheres; thus, the countries` authorities - alongside international bodies - have sought to combat it by enacting the necessary laws and regulations and enforcing them. This collaboration occurs to prevent the establishment of a free zone for money laundering and ensures that the efficiency of enforcing these regulations is not disrupted. Iran, due to being in the financial Action Task Force (FATF) blacklist, is considered a free zone from this perspective. This makes the research on evaluating money laundering methods applicable to this country and also makes selecting suitable methods significant and appealing. Therefore, this study utilized the findings of the study by Hendriyetty and Grewal (2017) and, considering the information limitations in Iran, employed a combination method using capital flight approach as an index for measuring money laundering. The results of the research indicate that over a 28-year period, from 1995 to 2022, approximately 553 billion dollars have been laundered in Iran, averaging about 20 billion dollars annually. The highest amount of money laundering in Iran occurred in 2011, during which nearly 55 billion dollars was laundered in the country. Additionally, the observations show the lowest amount of money laundering at around 4.8 billion dollars in 2001.