Singapore, the priority for anti-money laundering is cyber scams

Prioritise investigations on high-profile money laundering; investigate and bring to trial professional intermediaries in Singapore who facilitate money laundering; commensurate penalties with the crime to make them dissuasive. And then, monitor the application of alternative measures so that they do not defeat the purpose of anti-money laundering efforts and enable more investigations by financial intelligence. These are the main recommendations that the report of the Financial Action Task Force (Fatf) leaves on the money laundering front in Singapore, whose work is considered, on the whole, satisfactory: so much so that it has led to a 141 per cent increase in the number of money laundering investigations opened. Some improvements should also be made to the preventive measures of terrorist financing and the inherent financial sanctions.

From 2020 to 2025, 126 investigations were opened in the Asian state for terrorist financing and over 11 thousand for money laundering, 141 per cent more than in the 2016 survey. According to Fatf, in 80 per cent of the cases that triggered investigations were complaints from citizens who were victims of fraud. 93 per cent of the time, crimes committed in Singapore and increasingly linked to financial intermediaries related to cyber-enabled frauds (Cef), the scams carried out with the help of digital means, were behind the report. Compared to the previous edition of the report, the increase in money laundering investigations was almost fourfold, largely driven by victims of CFCs. The figure highlights, on the one hand, the growing risk that digitisation poses and, on the other, the increased sensitivity of Singaporeans to the issue.

Investigations were not always formalisedinto indictments, both because they involved financial intermediaries with foreign connections and because of the difficulty of establishing intent to commit crime, which is crucial to establishing criminal liability. Overall, Singapore has a high rate of convictions (82%), but most come from low-profile cases: this affects the possibility of prosecuting networks of higher economic value and more sophisticated money laundering schemes, as well as limiting the recovery of assets linked to transnational actors.

The high rate of guilty pleas - including plea bargains - weakens the deterrent power of penalties, while alternative measures have gained central importance in recent years. According to the report, the focus on money laundering offences is matched by less attention to other types of crime such as bribery, tax fraud or trade-based money laundering.