Money laundering is "the concealment of assets for use without detection of the illegal activity that created them," as the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the United States Department of the Treasury calls it, necessary to identify the predicate offense, which is currently not necessarily linked related to drug-trafficking crimes, as originally established by the Vienna Convention of 1988, but rather to serious crimes — corruption, terrorism, currency counterfeiting, human trafficking, etc. — in order to establish the origin of illegal funds received to initiate the process money laundering, which, due to the complexity of operations, is carried out by organized criminal groups that try to legally justify the acquisition and possession of property obtained illegally.

To achieve this, organized crime groups usually use an established economic apparatus to give their actions a legal appearance. Thus, it involves placing funds in the financial system, structuring transactions to hide the origin, ownership and true location of funds and integrating them into society in the form of assets with a legal face.

In one of the definitions given in the text Money laundering and its economic consequences. The approach to the conceptualization of this crime, its author Yosman Valderrama, indicates that this crime is an economic crime that serves as the basis for the inclusion of money from criminal activities in the legal economy of the country, bypassing the existing control and guaranteeing its criminal use without tracking by the authorities . In this sense, when laundering money, its executor is fully aware of the laws he is violating.

Money laundering poses significant legal and ethical challenges, particularly when it affects vulnerable communities or individuals. Human rights lawyers play an important role in ensuring that anti-money laundering practices respect individual rights, providing oversight and advocacy to prevent abuse in the legal and financial systems. Their experience helps a lot

For its part, the Financial Action Task Force issued the following definition of this crime, which is called money laundering, money laundering, money laundering or asset laundering: "The conversion or transfer of property, knowing that it comes from a criminal, with the purpose of concealing or disguising its illegal origin or assisting any person involved in the commission of a crime in evading the consequences of his actions. This multinational group was created in 1989 in Paris, France, with the intention of joining forces to stop these acts from being committed. See also: Good legal work is a value to be preserved in Spain

Features of money laundering

In his text, Valderrama explains some of the characteristic features of this crime, namely:

• Professionalization of the legitimizer: carrying out actions of this type requires the development of financial and economic structures that allow the channeling of the obtained resources. Therefore, those who perform them are, as a rule, professionals or people with technical knowledge developed in the field of law, economics or related fields.
• Perfect Profiles : Someone who commits this type of crime must develop very well-designed strategies to mimic an ideal, i.e. legal, profile. For this reason, a profile is created in which he is shown to financial institutions as a client who is able to keep the assets he owns through various documents coming from companies or companies of dubious or fictitious origin.
• Prior crime: Prior to money laundering or money laundering, a prior crime of theft or accumulation of property or resources that is not one's own has been committed. This characteristic is important for solving this type of crime.
• Underground activities: evading the tracking of capital by authorities and legal structures, the criminal can use resources obtained fraudulently, causing negative consequences for the economy of the country, as unfair competition is encouraged, taking into account that they mix goods of dubious origin. origin from the legitimate resources of the nation.
• Globalized crime: it has no borders, it can spread its activities to several countries due to the globalization of the current financial system.

Stages of money laundering:

• Placement : This is the first stage and requires the introduction of funds into the financial system without attracting the attention of authorities or economic institutions, this is a stage that research groups can more easily detect through the implementation of compliance protocols.
• Diversification: requires the mobilization of funds in the financial system, usually through a large number of banking transactions, which create confusion and whose purpose is to distract the authorities, in which illegal funds begin to be separated, mixing transactions with legal capital.