Nearly $170 Million Returned: How the State of Illinois Reunited 1.5 Million Families with Their Money
Discover how Kroll helped Illinois return nearly $170 million in unclaimed property to 1.5 million families through innovative data matching technology that automated the entire process and eliminated the need for complex claim procedures.
The Challenge
A leading bank in the APAC region had lost hundreds of millions of dollars to sophisticated fraud schemes. Despite having a robust rules-based transaction monitoring system in place, the bank faced a critical blind spot: their traditional approach could only flag suspicious customers and transactions in isolation.
The real threat lay hidden in plain sight - coordinated fraud rings and money mule networks operating across thousands of customers were systematically exploiting vulnerabilities. These large-scale, interconnected schemes flew under the radar of conventional monitoring systems, leaving the bank exposed to large financial losses and regulatory risk.
The bank needed to see the bigger picture, not just individual red flags.
Kroll's Solution
Kroll delivered a groundbreaking proof-of-concept using network analytics - also known as graph analytics - to enhance how the bank detected fraud and money laundering activities.
Our approach mapped the hidden connections between millions of entities across hundreds of millions of transactions, examining relationships between customers, third parties, emails, IP addresses, and business accounts. Using advanced data science models, we identified customer networks linked to suspicious activities that traditional systems had completely missed.
Key capabilities delivered:
- Comprehensive network mapping across large transaction datasets
- Advanced risk-scoring models to prioritize high-threat networks
- Interactive visualizations revealing fraud ring structures and key actors
- Rapid deployment using open-source data science tools
This fresh perspective transformed transaction monitoring from reactive individual case review to proactive network-wide threat detection.
The Impact
The results spoke for themselves - Kroll's network analytics approach delivered exceptional detection capabilities that far exceeded traditional methods:
- 90% true positive rate for high-risk network detection, dramatically reducing false positives and investigation time
- 78% of detected cases were previously unidentified by the bank's existing systems, representing significant losses in potential fraud that would have gone undetected
- Weeks, not months to analyze over 100 million transactions and deliver actionable insights
- Enhanced compliance capabilities with clear visualizations for AML teams to understand complex fraud structures and pursue targeted investigations
- Significant cost savings through more efficient allocation of investigation resources and reduced manual transaction review
By uncovering the hidden connections that fraudsters exploit, Kroll provided the bank with a new path toward more effective transaction monitoring - one that sees fraud networks before they can cause large-scale damage.
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