By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

The Financial Intelligence Unit of the Drug Control Institute announced a special report that gathers the modi operandi related to the crimes of money laundering and terrorist financing.

A modus operandi, often shortened to M.O., is someone's habits of working, particularly in the context of a business or criminal investigations, but also more generally.

The study, which will be used by investigative specialists, summarizes to the cases detected between 2018 and 2019, as a result of reports of suspicious operations carried out nationally and internationally.

Recently, the unit made the first of a series of presentations on these typologies or M.O.s, to training officers of public and private banks.

“The typologies are methods and description of techniques used by criminals and criminal organizations to deceive the authorities by simulating a commercial activity as if it were legal in order to mobilize financial resources in the economic system to be mixed and thus avoid detection by of the authorities,” said Román Chavarría, head of the Unit.

According to Chavarría, the goal of the report is to allow financial institutions and investigative authorities to manage appropriate preventive actions and to implement a risk-based approach to deal with the crime of money laundering and terrorist financing in a better way.

According to the specialists, the study presents the specific descriptions of risk situations in which money has been mobilized in a suspicious condition, such as:

- Risks of cash in large volumes in foreign currency through foreign transfers whose origin is unknown.

- Activities related to sports betting, whose owners are foreigners who settle in the country, being an activity that has historically been linked to money laundering and organized crime.

- Cases related to risks in the financing of political parties, where risks have been identified against the possibilities of illicit capital to finance campaigns and cases related to fraudulent operations.

- Excessive proliferation of retail businesses where high sums of cash are managed and whose owners are foreigners, these being the main characteristics of this type of network.

According to Guillermo Araya, general director of the Institute of Drug Control, the importance that this type of study contribute to the anti-laundering system and that also highlights the different ways of introducing illicit money into the country's economy.

“It is expected that in a short term, our unit can release a new document with other forms that have been identified in recent months and that should attract the attention of banks and financial institutions, supervisors and investigative authorities," said Araya.

According to the report, cases of international corruption are related to investigations carried out by the unit on people who have held high public offices, which have carried out international financial transactions related to corruption offenses.



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