Money generated from illegal activities - Dissertation Example

Money laundering can be seen as a deliberate effort that is made to close the trail of criminals. Money laundering is seen as a convenient outlet through which the trail of criminals can be cleaned in order to blot out all tracks that would lead to them.A person who sells drugs or a person who runs a human trafficking ring which leads to prostitution might want to find ways of injecting funds legally into the economy to appear legal. This can be done by banking the proceeds as part of the ‘profits’ made through his restaurant or banking them as part of a casino’s winnings.

All these are deliberate efforts that are meant to erase any investigative tracks that are meant to pin them down as criminals.The concept of money laundering becomes more complicated when it spans across different national borders. This is because the inclusion of other countries in a money laundering attempt makes it much more difficult to detect and tough to resolve since it requires the cooperation of different law enforcement regimes to combat it effectively. This is not always easy and it comes with a high degree of complications.

The two variables are legal systems and cooperation and it is very difficult to attain convergence.Money Laundering involves three main phases: placement, layering, and integration. Placement involves the separation of illicit funds from the illegal source. This means that money gotten from illegal means are taken out of the original source and prepared to be sent to some other category of funds which might disguise its origins. Once placement is done, there is layering, which involves the integration of the illicit funds into the financial systems.

This involves the lodgement of these illegal money in some kind of category of funds that is legally acceptable. Finally, there is integration of the illegal funds into the legitimate economy. This means that the money is spent in the normal sense as though the money was gotten from any other legal source of funds. This means that the money is likely to be seen as legal when it is far from the normal legal funding. Money Laundering and its Relationship to Terrorism Money laundering is often used to describe the general sense of presenting illegally acquired funds as though they