The victim makes the transfer. The trail runs through a stranger’s account.

What happened

According to De Nederlandsche Bank, the number of fraudulent transfers, card payments and cash withdrawals in the Netherlands rose by 30% in 2025, to about 658,000, and the amount involved by 22%, to €198 million. Credit transfers account for most of it: €148 million, against €121 million in 2024. DNB notes that in these cases consumers and businesses are often misled into making the transfer themselves, for example by someone posing as a family member, an investment adviser or the bank’s help desk, and that the rise is concentrated in instant and cross-border payments, which are harder to reverse. Measured against volume, fraud remains rare: seven in every 100,000 payments.

The money has to go somewhere. In Belgium, Febelfin published a survey on 11 December 2025: 7% of young people have been approached directly to act as a money mule, and more than 60% of those approached accepted. 14% of young people aged 16 to 30 say they would hand over their bank card and PIN to a stranger, against 5% of the population as a whole. Febelfin describes the mechanism: money obtained through phishing is paid into the mule’s account and then withdrawn or transferred onward, so the organisation behind it stays out of sight.

Two other changes touch the same chain. Since 9 October 2025, payment service providers in the euro area must offer Verification of Payee, which tells a payer before a transfer whether the name matches the account. And the EU anti-money-laundering package is moving from text to supervision. The Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) in Frankfurt started operations in 2025; it will select forty entities for direct supervision during 2027 and start that supervision in 2028. The AML Regulation, a single rulebook for obliged entities, applies from 10 July 2027.

What it shows

Fraud and money laundering meet in the same accounts. A transfer flagged as fraud on the victim’s side is, on the receiving side, a deposit into an account that may be used as a mule. The alert, the transaction history, the customer contacts, the account-opening file and the report to the financial intelligence unit often sit in different systems and teams. These are typical patterns that investigation teams describe, not findings from the sources above.

• Alerts without context. Transaction monitoring flags a pattern; the investigator then gathers the customer file, earlier alerts and contacts by hand.
• Speed. With instant payments, money moves on within seconds. The investigation works from a timeline that is already hours old.
• Explaining every step. Each decision, from blocking an account to filing a report, has to be explained later to a supervisor or a court.

What changes with one investigation timeline

The useful step is to bring alerts, transactions, case notes and communications together in one investigation record. In Meridian Platform, a case holds a timeline, documents and link analysis between accounts, people and events; these are existing capabilities. Connecting transaction monitoring, account data and your case system is a project integration, through read-only connectors into a data layer in your own environment.

Meridian AI can summarise a case file and answer questions with references to the documents and transactions it used, so an investigator can check each statement against its source. It does not decide whether a transaction is fraudulent, it does not block accounts and it does not file reports. Investigators and compliance officers decide, and every access is logged. Meridian is designed to support investigation work; it does not make an institution compliant with anti-money-laundering rules. This article does not suggest that any organisation named in the sources uses Meridian.

Start with closed cases

A sensible first project takes a set of closed fraud or money-mule cases and rebuilds them in one timeline from the original sources. Measure how long it takes today to assemble a case, how often a link between accounts was found late, and how much of the report text could be prepared from the record. Then compare with the connected record, with the investigators who handled the cases as judges.

The transfer takes seconds. Putting the facts of the case in one place should not take weeks.