Cops versus crooks: Technological competition and complexity in the co-evolution of information technologies and money laundering

Technologies, the convergence of relatively simple-to-complex tools and techniques enabling human behaviors and accomplishments, constitute a primary force for competitive advantage in crime versus policing. Modern information technologies (IT) are inherently complex and fundamental to the commission, detection, prevention and control of emerging forms of high tech financial crime. Money laundering is a financial crime committed via IT-facilitated placement, layering, and reintegration of illicit funds into legitimate and illegitimate economies. Hence, my thesis that: criminal adoption and use of IT to commit money laundering throughout the 20th Century resulted in it becoming increasingly complex and therefore more difficult for the police to manage.; Increasing technological complexity in money laundering presents special challenges and implies the need to consider technology explicitly when formulating public policies for its prevention and control. To this end, my research explains: (a) how crime and policing co-evolve technologically; (b) how technological complexity factors into crime and policing evolutionary processes; (c) how money laundering co-evolved with IT to create an extremely complex basis for the perpetuation of transnational organized crime; and (d) how public policies can ameliorate law enforcement's technological disadvantages with criminals and thereby improve detection, prevention, and control of money laundering and other forms of high tech crime. My research also advances a new conceptual framework for understanding how some crime and methods for policing it become increasingly complex as the result of adopting complex technologies. Methods include: (1) purposive interviewing of experts and content analysis of interview transcripts; (2) history construction of money laundering in the U.S; and (3) comparison of federal case prosecution records for evidence of increasing complexity in money laundering before and after widespread public use of the Internet.