What has been the impact of the global financial crisis on AUSTRACs operations?
Times of economic volatility tend to give rise to opportunistic scams and dodgy schemes, with unscrupulous individuals trying to make money out of other people’s difficulties. We’ve also witnessed the collapse of long-standing dubious schemes because the financial crisis means they can no longer continue to operate. The Ponzi Scheme of Bernard Maddoff in the United States – which was estimated to have lost investors more than $50 billion – is one example. In this case, the funds of new investors were paid to long-standing investors in order to induce even newer investors. The scheme apparently generated minimal profits from business activities, with any new money invested going towards paying returns to other investors and therefore requiring a constant stream of new investments in order to survive. So the global financial crisis has focused the operations of AUSTRAC to identify these sorts of schemes more readily and work with our partners to put a stop to them. Which of AUSTRAC’s ach
