MINT is a graph neural network framework designed to detect illicit accounts in financial transaction networks. It addresses structural inconsistency by using an attentive message‑passing scheme that tracks deviations between nodes in bi‑directional flows and a transaction salience module that regularizes node interactions. To cope with limited labeled data, MINT employs Positive‑Unlabeled learning, leveraging a small set of known illicit nodes and many unlabeled ones, and demonstrates superior performance on three benchmark datasets.
By Yin-Ju Wu, Bi-Cheng Yan, Berlin Chen
The paper introduces Temporal-Context Edge Enrichment (TCEE), a framework that uses frozen time‑series foundation models (TSFMs) to summarise each account’s transaction history and enrich transaction representations with temporal context. These enriched edges can be directly scored for classification or used as features in a graph neural network (GNN). Across six AMLWorld datasets, TCEE improves PR‑AUC by an average of 10.8% over the best baseline and trains 6.0× faster; when combined with a GNN, it yields an additional 4.8% improvement on smaller datasets and a 14.5% gain on an Ethereum phishing dataset.
By Danae Natalie Savvidi, H. \c{C}a\u{g}r{\i} Bilgi, Kubilay Atasu, Arie van Deursen
arXiv:2604. 17420v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Money laundering poses severe risks to global financial systems, driving the widespread adoption of machine learning for transaction monitoring.
By Keyang Chen, Mingxuan Jiang, Yongsheng Zhao, Zeping Li, Zaiyuan Chen, Weiqi Luo, Zhixin Li, Sen Liu, Yinan Jing, Guangnan Ye, Xihong Wu, Hongfeng Chai
The paper investigates how to detect money‑laundering patterns across separate bank transaction graphs using federated learning. By leveraging transactions that both banks already record, the authors approximate remote account states locally and run multi‑layer Graph Neural Networks without exchanging sensitive account data. Experiments on AMLworld HI‑Small show that a simple baseline using locally available information yields the greatest performance, while adding limited context such as transaction counts improves results; however, sharing detailed remote states requires excessive noise that diminishes utility.
By Lidia Losavio, Dario Fenoglio, Martin Gjoreski, Marc Langheinrich
The paper introduces GARG-AML, a graph-based framework designed to detect smurfing—a money‑laundering technique that splits large transactions into smaller ones—to improve anti‑money laundering efforts. It quantifies smurfing risk with a single interpretable metric derived from the second‑order transaction network, offering a balance between computational efficiency and transparency. The authors demonstrate GARG‑AML’s scalability on large random networks and its effectiveness on two open‑source money‑laundering datasets, suggesting it can enhance smurfing detection and support investigative decision‑making.
By Bruno Deprez, Bart Baesens, Tim Verdonck, Wouter Verbeke
arXiv:2607. 10131v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Money laundering threatens financial stability and exposes institutions to penalties, motivating automated detection.
By Lidia Losavio, Francesco Sovrano, Dario Fenoglio, Martin Gjoreski, Marc Langheinrich
The paper presents a graph‑based method for detecting money‑mule accounts by treating a bank’s relational schema as a heterogeneous graph and scoring each account using multi‑hop neighbourhoods, per‑column encoders, relative‑time encoding, and HeteroGraphSAGE message passing. On a five‑year RBIH retail‑banking dataset of 400 million transactions, the model achieves 83 % precision and a 0.5 % false‑alarm rate, recovering nine out of ten held‑out mules and outperforming tree‑based baselines in recall while maintaining precision deep into the alert queue. The approach can be deployed directly on a bank’s existing database without constructing a custom feature graph.
By Owais Ahmad, Anirudh Deodhar
arXiv:2610.31718v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Financial transaction networks are naturally represented as multigraphs, where repeated transactions between the same pair of accounts are modeled as d...
By Dennis Heijmans, H. \c{C}a\u{g}r{\i} Bilgi, Rui Wang, Kubilay Atasu
Money-mule networks move criminal funds through many small transfers, each of which looks ordinary on its own. What marks an account as a mule lies outside any single transfer: in the counterparties a...
arXiv:2606. 17555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Banks simultaneously face signature-based fraud (card-not-present attacks, account takeover, ATM cloning) and behavioural financial crime (structuring, layering, mule networks, business email compromise) -- two threat families with fundamentally different detection requirements.
By Joseph Walusimbi, Joshua Benjamin Ssentongo
arXiv:2607. 19350v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial institutions face significant challenges in detecting sophisticated money laundering patterns, such as smurfing and layering, due to extreme data imbalance (0.
By Mariam Zakaria Moussa Ali
The paper presents a semi‑supervised learning framework for detecting illicit Bitcoin flows in Shared Send Mixers, using a large historical dataset of 163 million transactions. It demonstrates that the success of SSL depends on data quality rather than sheer volume, with high‑fidelity features such as KeyLinker address clustering and Shared Send Untangling complexity metrics achieving an F1 score of 0.84 on unlabeled data. The study also shows that common heuristics like One‑Time Change introduce noise, underscoring the importance of smarter feature engineering in blockchain forensics.
By Yekaterina Smolenkova, Nickolay Larionov, Nikolay Ivanov, Yury Yanovich