Trends in Canadian Suspicious Transaction Reporting (STR) Part II – October 2011

This report (Trends in Canadian Suspicious Transaction Reporting (STR) Part II – October 2011) is the second in a series of FINTRAC publications that are intended to provide strategic financial intelligence and feedback to reporting entities about suspicious transactions reports (STRs). The first FINTRAC report on Trends in Canadian Suspicious Transaction Reporting, released in May 2011, presented a preliminary analysis of STRs submitted to FINTRAC between 2001 and 2010, using geospatial and text mining techniques. That report was the first FINTRAC attempt to use the text mining technique and served as the foundation to the current more sophisticated methodology.

This Trends and Typologies report on STRs is a continuation of the first one, and consists of an enhanced automated analysis of English and French STRs submitted to FINTRAC from January 1st, 2007 to December 31st, 2010. It provides a greater focus on select topics related to money laundering and terrorist financing that are described by reporting entities in the Part G narrative of STRs. In order to keep providing feedback to reporting entities in relation to STRs and keep highlighting interesting trends as FINTRAC’s text mining capabilities develop in sophistication, it is our intention to keep producing this series of analytical publications.

There are several sections in this report. Part 1 provides a broad overview of the material introduced in the first report and addresses the new methodology used to analyze STRs in the current report. Part 2 describes the trends observed in the Part G narrative of STRs, by specific sector, and contains the report’s main findings. Part 3 provides a brief overview of the dominant themes related to reasons for suspicion in STRs across all sectors. Conclusions are offered in Part 4.