Money mule

An account used to move someone else's illicit money.

A criminal needs a place to send stolen or illegal funds without using their own name, so they route the money through another person's bank account.

An account, often recruited or coerced, used as an intermediary layer in a laundering chain. Laundering means disguising the origin of illicit money so that it looks legitimate, and a chain is the series of transfers that makes the trail hard to follow.

A money mule operation typically works like this:

1. Criminals obtain illicit funds, for example from scams or account takeover.
2. They send the money to a mule's account.
3. The mule moves it onward, often by wire, cash withdrawal, or cryptocurrency, and may keep a small cut.
4. The trail now runs through an account in a real person's name.

Law enforcement agencies commonly describe three kinds of mule:

• Unwitting mules are tricked, for example by a fake job offer or a romance scam, and do not know the money is illicit.
• Witting mules know the money is illicit and choose to move it.
• Complicit mules work with criminal groups on a continuing basis.

Money mules sit next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Anti-money laundering (AML) is the set of rules and controls that aim to stop illicit money from moving through the system.
• Fraud ring is a coordinated group of fraudulent identities, and rings often use mules.
• Structuring is breaking up deposits to avoid reporting, a technique mules often use.

The word "mule" also appears in other schemes. For one example, see Laptop Mules: How North Korea Is Infiltrating Remote Workforces (Part 1) and Part 2.