Stephanie explains the flow of transactions that lead to an off-shore company to Tom Hansen, FINTRAC’s Assistant Director of Tactical Financial Intelligence.

Profile: Stephanie

Connecting the money to the crime

Stephanie analyses money laundering and organized crime—a murky world where the profits can blend into legitimate business transactions.

Starting the day

Stephanie’s morning routine starts with a short bus ride to work and a stop for coffee before going into the office. After working for a Toronto bank for three years, Stephanie decided to move to Ottawa to join a small federal agency, Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, that detects and deters money laundering and terrorist activity financing. “The decision to change career direction has been a good one,” says the young commerce graduate. “I get to use all the things I learned in banking and at school in a new way.”

Once in her office, Stephanie pulls two stacks of paper out of a locked cabinet, and powers up her computer. It’s time to go to work on the puzzle she began three weeks ago – a complex case of suspected money laundering. 

Money laundering and transnational organized crime are murky worlds and the profits can blend into the transactions of legitimate businesses. For Stephanie, trying to uncover those connections through the movement of dirty cash keeps her engaged in her work. “The money can originate from drug trafficking or large-scale fraud; following the transactions can shed light on who is involved,” Stephanie explains.

The work begins

The work began when Stephanie’s manager handed her a thin file, containing only the name of a man in Toronto, his date of birth and the fact that he was the subject of a drug trafficking investigation. Today, the file has grown to two large folders, spilling over with paper, held together with paper clips.  Stephanie has uncovered a much bigger picture by linking the man’s financial transactions to other businesses and individuals, including his ownership of an overseas company that has been receiving transfers of money from many cities in Canada and the United States. These transfers seemed suspicious, given the types of businesses that were involved. The scope of this illicit enterprise was also surprising, even to Stephanie, with all the transactions totalling more than $70 million.

She stretches out the paper in the files, in order to piece together all the players and their bank accounts. The charts on Stephanie’s computer screen resemble a complicated family tree. Every line is a transaction and every individual has been plotted on the screen. “Even though I can’t talk about my work, uncovering connections and accounts that no one has seen gives me great satisfaction, particularly when I know that it will help an investigation.” 

Working in the background

Throughout her time at university, Stephanie worked part time as a customer service representative for a bank. This is where she first heard of FINTRAC. “I was taught how to identify suspicious transactions and to report them to FINTRAC. Thinking back on it now, this job seems like a natural progression.”

Stephanie feels she has taken this case as far as she can. This morning, she will explain her findings and where the transactions have led to Tom Hansen, FINTRAC’s Assistant Director of Tactical Financial Intelligence.  If her work meets the legal test that it would be relevant to an investigation, the files will be prepared for disclosure to police in Toronto. After working on similar cases, Stephanie knows her work will be valuable to investigators in many ways: identifying criminal assets that might have been hidden, identifying new individuals whose involvement might not have been known and providing police with information needed to obtain warrants to advance their investigation. 

Although Stephanie’s work will contribute to a police investigation, it will likely never be made public. Stephanie understands this part of the job and she is satisfied with working in the background, connecting the money with the crime. As she rides the bus in the weeks that follow, she will scan the newspaper for charges to be announced in Toronto.  

*Stephanie is an assumed name used to protect her identity

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