Top OSINT Techniques to Stay Ahead of Criminals
Given the increasing instances of money laundering, fraud, corruption, and other financial crimes, every organization must have an effective, robust, and technologically advanced AML compliance program.
OSINT Techniques are best known for gathering publicly available information over the internet, an advanced way of collecting not only basic information about an individual, but their activities, business plans, relationships, and much other information they share over the internet.
OSINT tools collect information from social media platforms, news articles, publications, and even from the dark web.
Financial institutions can use such information to perform comprehensive due diligence on their customers to implement comprehensive AML compliance efforts.
Are OSINT Tools helpful in combating Financial Crimes?
Open source investigation tools are particularly used by spy agencies and investigators to get criminal information using the digital footprints available over social media and other internet platforms.
So yeah, OSINT tools are indeed helpful for financial institutions to collect the desired information and combat money laundering activities thoroughly. Using the Open source intelligence tools, the compliance team can collect more comprehensive information about the client while onboarding them. What OSINT framework helps organizations is. It allows the compliance team and officers to gather publicly available data to uncover how one can be involved in any suspicious activities. t
The OSINT tools make suspicious transaction detection quite fast and accurate with fewer false positive rates.
OSINT techniques for better compliance program
- Web Scrapping
There are billions of people across the world using the internet, uploading information over the millions of websites indexed by Google. So as a compliance officer, you will have to find the relevant information, get the information of your clients, and try to understand the customer connection (if any) with the suspicious entities or businesses.
So you want to speed up this process. Financial institutions need to incorporate automatic scrapping tools. The automatic scrapping tool does it for you most accurately and quickly. This web-scrapping technique for gathering customer information is very useful for financial institutions because it can detect money laundering patterns and identify the people involved in financial crimes.
- Gathering information using Social Media
Are there any internet users who do not use either of the social media apps? There are very rare chances of this. Due excessive use of social media, and the sharing of personal information, business plans, and relationship status make it quite easy for the compliance team to find the connection of clients with any suspicious individuals. Studies have shown that social media is a hub of rich sources of personal information.
So if that information is analyzed properly, it could be helpful for businesses to check which clients are associated with a person who could be involved in money laundering or any other suspicious transactions.
- Checking the public record for better compliance
Government and private public information about different individuals over their websites. So, the compliance team must check that data deeply before onboarding any client.
The best way to collect information on suspicious transitions is to collect court records, business records, and other information.
If your compliance team successfully collects all this information, it makes it quite easy for financial institutions to assess the risk.
Gathering information from these sources is a complicated task but what you get in return is more valuable than the time and resources you spend on getting such information.
- Assessing the Risk Level through Multimedia Sources
What could be a more interesting technique for gathering information than analyzing different images and video data available over different platforms like social media and websites? For that, the companies can use the techniques of reverse image search and metadata extraction techniques to better understand the data source.
Because this data can help know the detail that is often hidden in the textual information to know the interaction with the suspicious entities.
Adverse Media screening
Though this is a typical and conventional way of checking. But gathering the information from sources that are not accessible over the websites is very crucial and for that information, you will have to follow the OSINT scraping technique to gather the latest news updates about those people that may be involved in the money laundering and other criminal activities.
OSINT tool by gathering information from different sources makes information decisions that enhance the AML compliance program. Having robust hands on the latest news and information makes sure you are following the latest techniques to not only combat money laundering crimes but also stay ahead of the risks.
Is following OSINT techniques necessary for Financial Institutions?
Regulatory bodies do not make it compulsory for financial institutions to incorporate OSINT techniques, but the FATF and other regulatory bodies stress the use of advanced technology to mitigate the chances of money laundering. OSINT could be more helpful in detecting the hidden techniques of money laundering and other financial crimes.
