In the podcast by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Why We Get Fighting Financial Crime Wrong Oliver Bullough explains his vision on fighting financial crime.

In their newsletter, RUSI summarised it as follows:

In this episode, Tom speaks with journalist Oliver Bullough about his new book ‘Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won’, which argues that the current system for fighting financial crime has become an expensive cycle of box-ticking and compliance that fails to stop money laundering. Bullough challenges the long-standing belief that existing anti-money laundering measures are effective, arguing that governments and institutions have become trapped on a ‘hamster wheel’ of regulation without questioning whether the enormous time and money spent are producing real results.

Bullough wrote this article for The Guardian on privatisation of governmental tasks to banks and other ‘obliged entities’ (in the newspeak of AMLA ‘OEs’). He remarked in that article : “But you don’t fight terrorism by ostracising blameless people, or by alienating whole classes of the population.“. The same applies to other aspects of the current system of fighting crime by involving private companies (‘anti-money laundering’ and combating the financing of terrorism).

Addition 16 September 2026
In the FD article ‘Underworld expert Oliver Bullough: ‘The shooting in Overasselt was also caused by money laundering’ (Onderwereldexpert Oliver Bullough: ‘Ook de schietpartij in Overasselt is veroorzaakt door witwassen’) Bullough is cited. He remains critical of the privatisation of crime-fighting in accordance with the international rules drawn up by the FATF.

From the article:
“‘The interesting thing about money laundering is that everyone seems to be working incredibly hard. But as far as we can tell – the figures aren’t perfect, but still – the criminal share of the global economy is currently exactly the same as it was thirty years ago.’” (machine translation).

And on countering terrorism financing:
“‘In the case of terrorist financing, the aim is to move money so that a crime can be committed. So it’s incredibly difficult to establish that. But that didn’t stop the government from demanding that banks combat terrorist financing and threatening them with huge fines if they failed to do so. So how do you track down terrorist financing? Well, the banks simply targeted Muslims.” (machine translation).