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Excluding the lucrative narcotics market, British Columbia is recognized as a center for the manufacture of counterfeit currency and credit cards, multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes, prostitution, illegal gaming with its associated crimes of loan sharking to robbery, and numerous other signature offences of organized crime. In this province, organized crime groups use a multi-disciplinary criminal approach. Law enforcement pressures in one area result in movement to areas which are not receiving the same level of attention. Not unlike portfolio diversification designed to balance investment risk, organized crime groups research the market place, strategically position their resources for effect, and factor in law enforcement events which may be disruptive. In fact, even prior to the development of information technology, a sub-criminal industry was developing to monitor law enforcement activities from within public utilities, financial institutions and related government sectors, which works to compromise law enforcement efforts. The information technology systems of the future, which will offer techniques and method to the advantage of law enforcement, will present the same opportunities to organized crime. Organized crime groups are entirely profit motivated. The elements displayed by these criminal organizations often replicate the entrepreneurial skills necessary to succeed in legitimate business with quality, reliability, and trustworthiness required to retain client loyalty. On the illicit side, the enterprise requires secrecy and caution with sophisticated methods of operation. Generally, the entrepreneurial attitudes, skills and experience are variables that appear to significantly influence the decision and opportunity to enter into organized criminal behavior. In addition to the existing offence of possessing the proceeds of crime, Canada's money laundering law of 1989, criminalized the use, transfer, the sending or delivering to any place, transport, transmit, alter, dispose of or otherwise deal with, in any manner or by any means, any property, or any proceeds of any property, with intent to conceal or convert, the criminal origin of that property. Similarly by the American definition, as offered by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) money laundering is the conversion of the monetary proceeds of a criminal activity, into funds with an apparent legal source. The definition offered by the United Nations is that money laundering is the process by which one conceals the existence, illegal source or illegal application of income, and then disguises or converts that income to make it appear legitimate. |