"Dirty Money Exploits Weakness to Enter" : A Narrative Literature Review on the Challenges of Combatting Money Laundering

Sammanfattning: Money laundering is believed to have been around since the introduction of money. It is a vast, international problem which challenges law enforcement agencies and legislating authorities, as well as financial institutions and organizations of interest, all over the world. The past few years, something new has snuck up on law enforcement agencies and legislating authorities, namely Blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. This has caused a number of reactions, such as nations and international organizations quickly updating their anti-money laundering regulations. This goes to show how money laundering is constantly evolving, which makes targeting this crime a constant challenge. There is currently a lot of research being conducted on Money Laundering and specifically research on how to tackle the issue. What this study wishes to contribute with is an overview of the recently published (year 2020), available literature on the matter, to facilitate the continuous work on how to best prevent and detect this crime. The aim with this study is to look at already existing literature and to establish what the current focus is when combatting Money Laundering. It is based on three research questions; What are the three main focus’ areas? What are the challenges? How is anti-money laundering regulations tackling cryptocurrency? The method used is a narrative literature review and the search was conducted through Malmö University Electronic Library. Following explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria, the analysis was based on a total of 22 articles. The results show that the focus’ areas’ and challenges are; cryptocurrency and specifically the EU’s fifth anti-money laundering directive, challenges with international cooperation, and lastly, the role of financial institutions and identifying the beneficial owner.