Beyond Static Datasets: A Behavior-Driven Entity-Specific Simulation to Overcome Data Scarcity and Train Effective Crypto Anti-Money Laundering Models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a behavior-driven simulation method to generate synthetic crypto transaction data, addressing data scarcity and class imbalance, to improve machine learning models for detecting money laundering activities.

Contribution

It presents a novel entity-specific simulation framework that creates customizable, behavior-embedded datasets for training more effective crypto anti-money laundering models.

Findings

Models trained on synthetic data perform well on real data

The simulator generates diverse transaction types

Enhanced detection accuracy with behavior-embedded data

Abstract

For different factors/reasons, ranging from inherent characteristics and features providing decentralization, enhanced privacy, ease of transactions, etc., to implied external hardships in enforcing regulations, contradictions in data sharing policies, etc., cryptocurrencies have been severely abused for carrying out numerous malicious and illicit activities including money laundering, darknet transactions, scams, terrorism financing, arm trades. However, money laundering is a key crime to be mitigated to also suspend the movement of funds from other illicit activities. Billions of dollars are annually being laundered. It is getting extremely difficult to identify money laundering in crypto transactions owing to many layering strategies available today, and rapidly evolving tactics, and patterns the launderers use to obfuscate the illicit funds. Many detection methods have been proposed ranging from naive approaches involving complete manual investigation to machine learning models. However, there are very limited datasets available for effectively training machine learning models. Also, the existing datasets are static and class-imbalanced, posing challenges for scalability and suitability to specific scenarios, due to lack of customization to varying requirements. This has been a persistent challenge in literature. In this paper, we propose behavior embedded entity-specific money laundering-like transaction simulation that helps in generating various transaction types and models the transactions embedding the behavior of several entities observed in this space. The paper discusses the design and architecture of the simulator, a custom dataset we generated using the simulator, and the performance of models trained on this synthetic data in detecting real addresses involved in money laundering.