Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do the launderers have access to thousands of accounts? And why wouldn't the actual owners of the accounts report the transactions?
The api seems to let you create new accounts fairly easily. Seems odd to me as the API provider is the bank. Based on KYC I presume they think they are all splits of the same account holder? I learned the other day that the name on account means shit, because scammers often give $account_details + $catfish_name and receive the money to $bank_details + $real_name. I don’t see how splitting to 1000 transactions and sen…
Banks rely on a fixed set of rules to trigger an investigation for money laundering. One of these rules is the value of the transaction. I worked in retail whilst at Uni in the UK and we often had people who had lot's of money in their accounts unable to make large purchases due to these checks. Their payment would be automatically blocked and you would get a phone number they had to call to be able to make the payment. It was for example when buying a £5000 kitchen (I worked in the equivalent of home depot in the UK). If they could have split that transaction down to say 10 payments of £500 it wouldn't have triggered anything on the bank side.
Overall these banks process a lot of transactions and so heavily rely on these rules to keep them within the law. They don't always work as can be seen here and the bank noticed that users were able to circumvent their crappy ruleset by split big transactions down to lots of small transactions.
Not sure about sending money to yourself I suspect they mean transferring money between two accounts you control which is different in the banking for from sending money to yourself. If you are in control of both accounts you are laundering the money by transferring it to another account when you secretly control both. It's a basic way people like the mafia and such have laundered money for decades. They will do it through facade companies or suchlike. So they have one of the gang be legit and "clean" setup a shop who deposits cash into their bank account from "sales". The shop is a real place that you could technically buy stuff from. They then transfer their profits to this other account that is the gangsters account. The gangsters is part owner and they are receiving money as they "own" the shop and the shop has made money from sales. The sales though are actually the gangster giving money to his own shop and them claiming that as sales to the bank. The bank doesn't know that the money is actually from selling drugs or robbing stores or w/e illegal stuff they have done. The result is that you have taken "dirty" money i.e. money that has came from some illegal activity and with this strange process you have made it into "clean" money that's come from some legal activity.
So basically all money laundering will be transferring money to "yourself" but it will be via a third party that probably takes a small cut for helping. It's worked like this for years and is super common.
The fixed set of rules they have in bank is because it used to be that making money movements was hard so the criminals would transfer say £250k in a single transaction as sales revenue. So banks could easily spot this and take action. Making money movements easier means they can bypass this check.