Money Laundering vs. Terrorist Financing
As you might have noticed, money laundering and terrorist financing often go hand-in-hand and are often taken together. Many organizations and institutions deal both with money laundering and terrorist financing as if they were synonymic and required for similar approaches.
In a way, this is so as both are about moving funds and both are criminal activities having criminal goals. As to amounts, they are quite large, but still, money laundering is considered to have enormously large amounts. Also, investigating money laundering and terrorist financing is often about picking up bit and pieces to get a full picture.
However, they differ in many ways.
So how are money laundering and terrorist financing different?
Let us start from the very beginning – this is where they originate. Money laundering is a process that legalizes illegal source. Terrorist financing, in its turn, is a process that often has a legitimate origin.
Also, the strategies and approaches to anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing cannot be exactly the same because when money is laundered, financial institutions know more than government, but when terrorism is financed, government knows more than financial institutions.
So, although money laundering and terrorist financing have much in common they should not be treated as one tendency.