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No one could have predicted the outcry from the industry, the public, Congress and the media on the know your customer (KYC) proposal unveiled on 7th December, 1998. For many years, compliance officers had heard about the possibility of a regulatory proposal to formalise the policy of identifying new account holders, reporting suspicious activity and training all employees. What was finally released went far beyond that.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the identity and payment method verification procedures implemented by a number of popular massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and online financial service providers (OFSPs) to determine if the systems they currently have in place are sufficient to uncover the identities of those who may wish to use such environments to conduct money laundering or terrorism financing activity.

The paper investigates whether the payment instruments or methods used by account holders to place funds into their account(s) hinder or assist investigators to expose the real‐world identity of the account holder. The paper then discusses whether it is feasible and/or desirable to introduce know your customer (KYC) and customer due diligence (CDD) legislation into virtual environments and illustrates an effective KYC approach which may assist MMOGs and OFSPs to correctly identify their account holders, should legislation be put in place.

The systems currently in place by all of the MMOGs investigated are wholly inadequate to successfully establish the real‐world identities of account holders. None of the information required at the account setup stage is verified and, therefore, cannot be reliably associated with an account holder in a real‐world context. It appears that all three of the MMOGs investigated are leaving the serious matter of identity and payment method verification to the organisations that assist in the sale and purchase of their in‐world currency such as third party currency exchanges and Internet payment systems (collectively referred to as OFSPs). However, many of these OFSPs do not have adequate systems in place to successfully verify the identities of their account holders or users either. The authors' experiments show that it can be a very simple process to open accounts and perform financial transactions with all of the OFSPs investigated using publicly available or fictitious identity information and a prepaid Visa® gift card. Although all five OFSPs investigated in this research claim to verify the identity of their account holders, and may already be subject to KYC and CDD legislation, their systems may need some work to ensure that an account holder or user is accurately identified before financial transactions can take place.

The authors believe that the electronic KYC approach discussed in this paper deals effectively with the challenges of global reach, anonymity and non‐face‐to‐face business relationships experienced by virtual environment operators, thereby assisting in the effective detection and possible prosecution of individuals who wish to use these platforms for illicit and illegal purposes.

The purpose of this paper is to find out the role and factors that lead to efforts by banking institutions to deal with money laundering by using the principle of knowing your customer.

This research method uses a sociological juridical approach and descriptive analysis in analyzing the data.

The results of the study found that the implementation of the principle plays a role in identifying each transaction, and if there is a transaction that is considered suspicious, each bank is required to report the transaction to the center for reporting and analysis of financial transactions.

Banks must reduce the risk of being used as a means of money laundering by knowing customer identities, monitoring transactions, maintaining customer profiles and reporting suspicious transactions made by parties using bank services. The application of the know your customer principle (KYCP) is based on the consideration that KYCP is not only important in the context of eradicating money laundering but also in the context of implementing prudential banking to protect banks from various risks in dealing with customers.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is first empirical study of banking in Indonesia that conduct money laundering crimes through application of KYCPs.

The aim of this study was to assess the level of awareness and acceptance of bank customers regarding anti-money laundering (AML) practices of banks. The study also aimed to understand their constraints in following the bank’s AML practice.

The target population was account holders of the banks above the age of 18 years, residing in the Puducherry and Chennai regions in India. Convenience sampling was adopted in selecting the sample from these states. The sample consisted of 416 customers of the public, private and foreign banks in India. The responses were collected by administering the pre-tested structured questionnaire. The data was collected during the period June–December 2014. Descriptive and non-parametric tests were applied, and the significance was considered at p = 0.5.

Respondents showed low level of awareness with regard to usage of banks as a channel for money laundering (ML) and terrorism financing (TF) activities (62.3 per cent), reporting function of the banks (70.4 per cent), AML and combating financing of terrorism (CFT) legislation (86.3 per cent) and about the existence of Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU)-India and its function (96.9 per cent). The customers were quite aware of ML (62.5 per cent) and customer identification requirements (95.2 per cent). The participants exhibited neutral attitude towards acceptance of AML measures (3.11 ± 1.31). The descriptive analysis showed 97.4 per cent were ready to provide their identification documents to the bank; however, 64.5 per cent of the participants were reluctant to update their Know Your Customer particulars when it has not experienced any change, and about 68.3 per cent expressed that banks should not disclose the details of their transactions to any third party including financial intelligence units.

The sample constituted only few participants from the foreign sector banks because of the difficulty in identifying the foreign bank customers.

There is a necessity to undertake public awareness campaigns on the importance of AML/CFT system either by the banks or FIU-India or both to increase the level of acceptance towards AML measures. This will help the banks to strengthen the bank–customer relationship.

An extensive review of literature could not find any research study on the assessment of awareness and acceptance of banking customers towards AML practices in India. Thus, this paper attempts to understand the level of awareness and acceptance in the bank customers towards AML practices.

Based on semi‐structured interviews with current senior officers of the Indonesian Police Force, Indonesian Attorney General's Office and the Indonesian Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (Pusat Pelaporan dan Analisis Transaksi Keuangan), the purpose of this paper is to consider the regulator context and governance of some key issues in Indonesia's anti‐money laundering (AML) regime: the progress of “know your customer” implementations and the crackdown on foreign bribery.

Interviewing respondents from key Indonesian agencies involved in the AML regime, the authors used semi‐structured interviews to develop a narrative analysis of the research questions.

The results of the narrative analysis suggest all three agencies are satisfied with the effectiveness of “know your customer” regulations, particularly in their capacity to heighten awareness. All respondents, however, were a little more circumspect on the foreign bribery crackdown.

The paper shows that at best, mutual legal assistance provided help for transaction reports and analysis. At worst, it appears foreign bribery issues are an intractable problem. It is concluded that policy tools need to be contextualised within Indonesia's socio‐economic realities rather than wholly struck from western fields.

Fresh “insider” insights were gleaned about the current state of play regarding “know your customer” principles and the clampdown on foreign bribery. This is of value to many parties involved in the advancement of AML, both within and outside Indonesia.

Know your customer (KYC), accounting standards, issuance, clearing, and trade settlement became the major barrier to implement accounting, accountability and assurance process in supply chain finance (SCF). Blockchain technology features have the potential to solve accounting problems. This research focuses on exploring how blockchain technology provides solutions to overcome the barriers of accounting process in SCF. The benefits, opportunities, costs and risks related to blockchain adoption are also explored.

Multi-case study and qualitative methods are used with a framework based on blockchain role to overcome the accounting process barriers. Ten blockchain projects in SCF and 29 interviews of participants as a unit of analysis are considered.

The findings indicate that blockchain technology offers solutions to solve accounting, accountability and assurance problems in SCF. Validity, verification, smart contracts, automation and enduring data on trade transactions potentially solve those barriers. However, it is also necessary to consider costs such as implementation, technology, education and integration costs. Then there are possible risks such as regulatory compliance, operational, code development and scalability risk. This finding reflects the current status of blockchain technology roles in SCF.

This study unveils blockchain's SCF accounting potential, emphasizing multi-case method limitations and future research prospects. Diverse contexts challenge findings' applicability, warranting cross-industry studies for deeper insights. Addressing selection bias and integrating quantitative measures can enhance understanding of blockchain's accounting impact.

Accounting professionals can get an idea of the future direction and impact of blockchain technology on accounting, accountability and assurance processes.

This study provides initial findings on the potential, costs and risks of blockchain that is beneficial for parties involved in SCF, especially for banks and insurance underwriters. In addition, the findings also provide direction for the contribution of blockchain technology to accounting theory in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the suitability of an ISO standard to create an internal control assessment model, which effectively acts as a control system template and mental model to evaluate compliance with the Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti‐money laundering (AML) requirements in the Luxembourg retail and private banking sector.

This paper used a qualitative approach with various focus groups and case studies, to elaborate and validate the developed model through methodological triangulation.

The proposed assessment model has a matrix structure that facilitates the incorporation of checklists and narratives to ensure effective testing of controls and its structure allows targeting specific areas of risk in the identified KYC/AML processes.

The development of the model tended to be time consuming and could explain why matrix formats are used less often and the traditional limitations of a qualitative research apply.

The model can be used to combine various reporting formats on internal control, hence the audit effectiveness can be increased and information asymmetries can be reduced.

The proposed assessment model offers an innovative approach because it combines a process view of the business with an internal control view. Research in internal control assessment models has been very limited in the past years.

This study aims to examine the associations between customers’ awareness of money laundering and terrorism financing, trust in banking secrecy measures and discomforts in fulfilling the bank’s anti-money laundering (AML) procedure and their acceptance of existing practices of banks regarding AML and counter-terrorism financing.

This study adapts a set of survey instruments developed and validated by prior studies to collect the required data. A convenient sample of 160 Malaysian bank customers aged 18 and above were surveyed to collect the data.

This study finds a significant relationship between the respondents’ awareness of money laundering and terrorism financing, trust in banking secrecy measures and their acceptance of the bank’s AML and counter-terrorism financing practices. However, no significant relationship is documented between the level of discomforts experienced by customers in satisfying the banks’ AML requirements and their acceptance of the banks’ AML practices. These results hold even after controlling for alternative explanations of the customers’ acceptance of banking practices examined in the extant literature: age, gender, location, literacy level and occupation.

This study extends the literature on customers’ acceptance of banking practices more broadly by providing empirical evidence on the role of customers’ awareness on issues underlying the banking practices and their trust in the bank’s secrecy measures.

This study also provides some practical contributions by shedding some light on the factors that could help banks increase the acceptance of AML practices among their customers. Thus, the findings of this paper help banks focus their effort on these factors and hence increase acceptance rate more effectively.

Drawing on the elements of the theory of reasoned actions and technology acceptance model and the extant research on trust-privacy and comfortability in a banking setting, this study proposes an integrated approach that is theoretically and empirically grounded.

This paper aims to advance the professional knowledge, experience and expertise of anti-money laundering (AML) professionals by focusing on how money laundering (ML) impacts a variety of financial institutions (FIs) and in what ways the FIs can retaliate to detect, prevent and mitigate the risk of ML.

This paper use data from secondary sources. Many FI cases have been included such as a bank money service business (MSB) and insurance companies.

There should be a culture of compliance in organizations. Upper management, such as a designated committee or board members, should set the tone of compliance. Money launderers take advantage of every possible opportunity to convert illicit proceeds into clean proceeds with any institution or profession.

This paper used a case study approach to study the nuances of money laundering activities in various jurisdictions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore dynamic issues relating to Ponzi and other fraudulent investment schemes to demonstrate how scammers convince victims of investment opportunities that turn out to be nothing but fraudulent. Specifically, it explores the nature of Ponzi, Pyramid, Advance fees scams and the mechanisms used to defraud unsuspecting victims of their money. The risks associated with Ponzi schemes can be gleaned in the fraud case of Bernie Madoff (1998) who had been running a Ponzi scheme in the USA for 20 years and reaping investors of their returns without ever discovering it until the business collapsed. The other notorious investment scams include “the Nigerian letter frauds” which combine the threat of impersonation fraud with a variation of an advance fee scheme in which a letter is mailed to offer recipients the “opportunity” to share in a percentage of millions of dollars that the author – a self-proclaimed government official – is trying to transfer out of his country. This article assesses the possibility of using anti-money laundering regulatory tools such as a “risk based approach” and “Know Your Customer” to protect victims of fraudulent investment schemes.

The paper was written by analysis of primary and secondary data and by utilising newspaper reports on different types of fraudulent investment schemes and the context in which they normally happen in practice. It has also utilized case studies and relevant examples to demonstrate different typologies of fraudulent schemes and the possibility of using anti-money laundering regulatory tools to regulate them.

The findings suggest that many people who fall victims of fraudulent investment schemes such as Ponzi and advance fee fraud are not gullible but lack knowledge of their sophistication and how they operate to defraud unsuspecting victims of their savings.

The paper was largely a library-based research, and there were no interviews carried out to corroborate some of the data used in writing it. This minimises inherent bias in the use of secondary data sources to undertake a study.

The practical implication of the paper is to highlight the inherent risks in Ponzi and other fictitious investment schemes that are often cleverly conjured to exploit ignorance of the public and defraud them of their savings. It demonstrates that while financial institutions can use their regulatory tools such as KYC to safeguard financial markets from criminal exploitation, people should be vigilant to avoid falling victims of criminal exploitation and lose their savings.

With globalisation, the market is awash with different types of investment opportunities, but people need to keep in mind that it has also created opportunities for criminal exploitation. Some opportunities that are being offered such as advance fee and other schemes are cleverly devised to exploit ignorance of the public. Therefore, this paper highlights the pitfalls which potential investors need to bear in mind when deciding on where to invest and how to invest their money.

Research on Ponzi schemes, advance fee fraud and misuse of letters of credit do not seem to have received proportionate scholarly attention as other forms of financial crimes. This paper, therefore, addresses a need in the market on many issues it relates.