January 11 2018
A major new social experiment suggests millions of Brits would be prepared to take on an illegal job as a money mule, highlighting significant failings in our understanding of the risks of laundering stolen money for criminals.
Money mules, who are tasked with withdrawing and transferring money to other accounts while keeping a small proportion themselves, are often unwittingly recruited by seemingly innocent adverts regularly linked to activity including organised crime, people trafficking and terrorism.
To test whether we would understand what we’d be letting ourselves in for, entirely legit international bank Santander presented 2,000 British adults with a falsified job description to work at a fictitious company called Money Spark as a ‘Financial Transaction Control Analyst’.
