Enhancing Money Laundering Detection in Bank Transactions using GAGAN: A Graph-Adapted Generative Adversarial Network Approach

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed profound transformations in the financial sector, driven by the integration of cutting-edge technologies into its core operations. Consequently, banks are increasingly utilizing technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and big data analytics to offer personalized services, streamline transactions, and improve risk management, enabling the development of new financial products and services that cater to the diverse and evolving needs of customers. Despite these benefits, the banking landscape has also brought about complex challenges, particularly in the fight against money laundering. Money laundering remains a significant threat to the integrity of financial systems, as criminals exploit digital advancements to conceal illicit activities. The growing complexity of digital transactions and the increasing volume of financial data have made detecting and preventing money laundering more challenging than ever. Existing AI-based solutions, while effective to some extent, often grapple with class imbalance issues. This paper addresses the challenge by introducing a novel model named GAGAN (Graph Attention Generative Adversarial Network) and enhances the detection of money laundering activities in bank transactions. The proposed model further addresses the issue of class imbalance, by incorporating Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) and Graph Attention Networks (GAT). The GAT classifier is then employed to accurately classify transactions, leveraging attention mechanisms to focus on the most relevant parts of the graph. Empirical results reveal that the proposed model achieves impressive performance metrics, with an accuracy of 98.62%, precision of 98.10%, recall of 98.92%, F1 score of 98.49%, AUC-ROC of 0.99, and a MCC score of 0.991. These results underscore the efficacy of the model in accurately identifying money laundering transactions, showcasing its potential as a robust tool for financial crime detection. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.