Abstract
The ease with which mobile money is used to facilitate cross-border
payments presents a global threat to law enforcement in the fight
against laundering and terrorist financing. This paper aims to use
machine learning classifiers to predict transactions flagged as a fraud
in mobile money transfers. Data for this paper came from real-time
transactions that stimulate a well-known mobile transfer fraud scheme.
This paper uses logistic regression as the baseline model and compares
it with ensembles and gradient descent models. The results indicate that
the established logistic regression model did not perform too poorly
compared to the other models. The random forest classifier had the most
outstanding performance among all measures. The amount of money
transferred was the top feature to predict money laundering transactions
through mobile money transfers. These findings suggest that more
research is needed to improve the logistic regression model. The random
forest classifier should be further explored as a potential tool for law
enforcement and financial institutions to detect money laundering
activities in mobile money transfers.