All publications

3 Dec 2025

Major Public Projects and Integrity: The M4 Experience

In collaboration between Transcrime, Crime&tech and M4

14 Nov 2025

On the enforcement of targeted sanctions

Estimating the control of sanctioned Russian entities over European companies and proposing a methodology to detect sanction circumvention

30 Jul 2025

Ville lumière Ou Ville obscure? Assessing the secrecy of firms owning real estate properties in Paris

The real estate market, especially the luxury one, has long been a target for money laundering purposes. A frequent scheme involves the misuse of legitimate– often offshore– firms to conceal the ownership of properties and the illicit origin of the invested funds. Despite the abundance of investigations, empirical research in…

19 May 2025

Criminal infiltration in the economy

This volume collects the proceedings of the conference “The Dynamics of Criminal Infiltration into the Economy: Risks and Remedies” (March 21, 2024, Milan – more information available here), organised by Transcrime – Joint Research Centre on Innovation and Crime of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore –…

14 Apr 2025

High-level Corruption: an Analysis of Schemes, Costs and Policy Recommendations

FALCON Project Policy Brief

19 Dec 2024

Terrorist Financing: Traditional vs. Emerging Financial Technologies

This study examines the use of traditional systems and emerging financial technologies for terrorist financing based on a dataset comprising 121 cases around the world. While there are speculations that terrorists are largely adopting emerging FinTechs like cryptocurrencies, our exploratory findings indicate that only 7 percent of cases involve such…

4 Nov 2024

New forms of, and risk factors for, high-level transnational corruption schemes

KLEPTOTRACE Handbook

14 Oct 2024

Financial crime risk assessment

Machine learning insights into ownership structures in secrecy firms

1 Mar 2024

Bid-rigging in public procurement: Cartel strategies and bidding patterns

Bid-rigging harms economies and societies. While existing research has primarily focused on quantifying the economic damages resulting from bid-rigging cartels, there is a relative dearth of studies exploring how firms interact and the specific techniques they use to rig tenders. Our paper examines the bidding behaviours associated with…

6 Feb 2024

Cleaning mafia cash: An empirical analysis of the money laundering behaviour of 2800 Italian criminals

Despite the wide reach of anti-money laundering legislation worldwide and increasing media attention, fostered by journalistic leaks such as Panama Papers, empirical knowledge on how criminals launder their illicit proceeds is still scarce. The few available empirical studies show that money laundering (ML) schemes are often less sophisticated than they are depicted…