Money laundering (ML) is the behavior to conceal the source of money achieved by illegitimate activities, and always be a fast process involving frequent and chained transactions. How can we detect ML and fraudulent activity in large scale attributed transaction data (i.e.~tensors)? Most existing methods detect dense blocks in a graph or a tensor, which do not consider the fact that money are frequently transferred through middle accounts. CubeFlow proposed in this paper is a scalable, flow-based approach to spot fraud from a mass of transactions by modeling them as two coupled tensors and applying a novel multi-attribute metric which can reveal the transfer chains accurately. Extensive experiments show CubeFlow outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in ML behavior detection in both synthetic and real data.
@article{arxiv.2103.12411,
title = {CubeFlow: Money Laundering Detection with Coupled Tensors},
author = {Xiaobing Sun and Jiabao Zhang and Qiming Zhao and Shenghua Liu and Jinglei Chen and Ruoyu Zhuang and Huawei Shen and Xueqi Cheng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.12411},
year = {2021}
}