Resistant AI, the fraud and financial crime services provider dedicated to protecting and safeguarding automated financial services, today announces it was awarded ‘Digital Crime Fighter of the Year’ for winning the second hackathon challenge at the ACAMS 21st Annual AML & Anti-Financial Crime Conference in Las Vegas last week. This win swiftly follows their award of ‘Digital Crime Fighter of the Year’ at ACAMS’ Inaugural Hackathon in March this year.

To take part in the hackathon, sponsored by PwC, participants were given five days to uncover evidence of sanctions evasion, one of the key themes of the conference and a topic of high geopolitical importance. Resistant AI’s approach to financial crime detection was recognised for its success a second time at the ACAMS event, demonstrating a real endorsement of the resources and approach utilised by the team.

Resistant AI’s team of data scientists, mathematicians and researchers joined with their strategic partner ComplyAdvantage to compete against nine other teams. They worked with a large and complex synthetic data set of over 1.1 million records of customer data; approximately two hundred thousand cash transactions across wires, credit card and ATM activity; cryptocurrency operations; as well as information on persons and organisations subject to sanctions.

Resistant AI used their data-driven, anomaly detection technology that incorporates a number of AI/ML detectors in an ensemble approach, specifically designed to discover new types of evasive criminal behaviour. They sifted through the data to discover links between entities, where multiple transactions had been made to hide identities, evidence of companies registered in alternative locations to appear less suspicious, or sending money through intermediary individuals or companies. 

As part of the competition, Resistant AI’s team made the final shortlist of two teams, which then presented their findings to a panel of senior anti-money laundering (AML) experts and leading industry figures. The winning team was allocated a charitable donation, which Resistant AI have given to the UNICEF Ukraine fund.

Martin Rehak, CEO and Founder of Resistant AI says, “We believe the key to our team’s success was their data-driven approach, analysing the hidden relationships between identities and transactions and enabling them to discover the financial activities that broke sanctions. We thank ACAMS and PwC for raising awareness of this area of AML, which is important now more than ever. We hope it encourages anti-fraud companies to focus more efforts on detecting the illegal breaking of sanctions.”

Many organisations face challenges when using a more model-driven approach to discover deceptive financial activities or suspicious behaviours. Resistant AI’s advanced analytics solution helped the hackathon team to more accurately detect evasive behaviours and produce results that demonstrated the routes criminals take to undermine sanctions.