Dealers in Precious Metals, Jewels and Stones engage in the business of production, mining or trading of precious metals or jewellery. This is a high-risk sector as it offers a lucrative market for criminals who want to hide, transfer or invest their illicit proceeds. As a registered dealer, manufacturer, trader or a miner in precious metals, jewels or stones, you are a “regulated entity”, if you:
This sector is an attractive channel for money laundering because cash is an acceptable method of exchange, and the goods can be transported easily. Trade-based money laundering: false reporting, commodity misclassification, carousel transactions, or round-tripping through other countries; make it difficult to identify the source of funds or the purpose of transactions. This allows the proceeds of crime and illicit activities to be laundered through these goods, exposing dealers to fraud, bribes or terrorism financing (TF).
Compliance begins at the onboarding stage with KYC, determining third-party involvement, ultimate beneficial owners, conducting sanctions and PEP checks, as well as checking SDN lists, if applicable. The ongoing risk-based approach includes scrutiny of cash transactions above the designated threshold, high-value transactions, high-risk clients, or high-risk countries; declaration of the sources of funds and legitimacy of the transaction; monitoring for unusual behaviour; and reporting of suspicious transactions and invoicing.
The ability to trade anonymously in these high-value goods using cash or cryptocurrencies makes it difficult to trace ownership. Other factors like ease of illegal smuggling or mining, transporting these goods across borders for criminal transactions, trade-based money laundering, lack of transparency in transactions and ownership structures, allows illicit funds to be incorporated into the legitimate economy. Other bad practices like inadequate documentation or using these precious goods for bribing, make dealers in precious metals vulnerable to AML/CTF compliance.
Businesses dealing with precious metals, jewels and stones are expected to establish the framework for a risk-based compliance program:
Set up and maintain your compliance program, as per the laws of your regulatory body. Non-compliance may result in criminal or administrative monetary penalties.
Ongoing compliance involves:
Our PEP and sanction screening service will help you reach your compliance requirements.
Our details scan reports provide you with an overview of in-depth information on potential risks to your organisation.
We provide access to multiple data sources to meet the varying requirements of users.
We update the information for all of our data sources daily to provide you with up-to-date relevant data.
Save the time manually checking names by using our batch scanning feature to scan bulk files of names simultaneously
Our service is straight-forward and easy yo use, making compliance easy by simplifying processes.
Perform due dilligence by assigning risk, determining true matches and recording decisions in the NameScan dashboard.
Conduct further research into potential matches and risks to your organisation through various sources.
Use our API to integrate with your existing systems to automate the screening process.
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