Terrorist financing enters its cryptocurrency era
A bi-annual update on global terrorist financing trends on terrorist financing from 2020-2024
Hello, Insight Monitor subscribers! I’m excited to share a new product with you today — our analysis of terrorist financing trends. I often get asked, “What’s new?” in terrorist financing? I struggle to answer because I don’t want to refer to headlines. I prefer my answers to be data-driven. If you feel the same way, today, you’re in luck! We crunched the numbers, and we can tell you ~exactly~ what’s new in terrorist financing. Have a read and let me know what you think in the comments or through email. We love hearing from you, and would be delighted to answer any questions you have about this. Thanks for caring about illicit finance and global security,
~Jess
Establishing a baseline
Since 2018, I’ve captured terrorist financing “cases” from media reports, court cases, government press releases, and other open sources. These are incidents of terrorist financing that refer to operational or organizational financing. In each case, we look for financing attributes, such as the methods and mechanisms involved in raising, using, moving, storing, managing, and obscuring funds. This builds on the data and analysis from my 2021 book Illicit Money.
Over the last six years, I’ve identified 618 terrorist financing cases that are now included in this dataset. As you can see in the graph below, data collection in 2018 and 2019 was still spotty. We instituted new data collection practices in 2020, so things took off then, and the data is robust from 2020 onwards.
There is an apparent dip in terrorist financing cases in 2021 and 2022. This is interesting because it mirrors a similar dip in FINTRAC terrorist financing disclosures that we attribute to the pandemic. Or was there just less terrorist financing? Or less reporting on it? Many intervening factors are likely to explain this, but it is interesting to see global terrorist financing cases largely mirror FINTRAC disclosure trends.
Is Canada giving up on tackling terrorist financing?
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! FINTRAC’s annual report dropped last week. Okay, I’ll admit that I’m probably the only one that excited about this report. But for those of you who don’t know, this report is one of the most transparent descriptions of the activities of a department or agency in the Canadian security and intelligence service. And while I’m often annoyed about our lack of measurements in the anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing world, this report at least gives us ~some~ insight. Read to find out how Canada is doing in its fight against money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes!
Our terrorist financing analysis course caters to researchers, intelligence, law enforcement, and compliance professionals to help them learn about terrorist financing and analyze suspicious patterns and activities more effectively. Sign up today!