Terrorist financing enters its cryptocurrency era
A bi-annual update on global terrorist financing trends on terrorist financing from 2020-2024
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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.
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