# TBML by Nerous

> Analysis and intelligence on trade-based money laundering (TBML): how illicit value moves through the invoices, shipments and settlement of ordinary cross-border trade, and how it is detected. Published by Nerous, which builds compliance technology for trade-finance crime.

Articles are grounded in primary sources — FATF, the Wolfsberg Group, OFAC, FinCEN, national regulators and court records — which are linked at the foot of each piece. Content sourced from AML vendor marketing is excluded by policy.

Every article below is also available as plain Markdown by appending `.md` to its URL.

## Reference

- [What TBML is, the three records, the four mechanisms and the twelve checks](https://tbml.ai/index.md): the site's own reference material in one file, including the check set as a table and a worked example whose figures reconcile.

## Explainer

- [Trade Misinvoicing: The Mechanics Behind Illicit Flows](https://tbml.ai/insights/trade-mis-invoicing-and-illicit-financial-flows.md): Trade misinvoicing involves the deliberate falsification of the value, volume, and/or type of commodity in an international transaction by at least one party involved.
- [What is trade-based money laundering, and why it evades traditional controls](https://tbml.ai/insights/what-is-trade-based-money-laundering.md): Trade-based money laundering settles a real payment against a misstated fact. Every control in the chain can work exactly as designed and still not see the transfer, because no single control holds both records.

## Red Flags

- [Over- and under-invoicing: what a price benchmark has to control for](https://tbml.ai/insights/over-and-under-invoicing-red-flags.md): A unit price is only high or low relative to a comparison. Most price-variance findings collapse because the benchmark ignored the incoterm, the quantity, the HS level, or the period, not because the price turned out to be defensible.

## Sanctions

- [OFAC's Sanctions Architecture and Its Relevance to Trade-Based Risk](https://tbml.ai/insights/sanctions-evasion-through-trade-intermediaries.md): OFAC is the U.S. Treasury office that administers sanctions programs and maintains country-specific sanctions information. OFAC sanctions programs can be either comprehensive or selective in scope.

## Typologies

- [Over- and under-shipment: reconciling what was billed against what was carried](https://tbml.ai/insights/over-and-under-shipment-quantity-manipulation.md): Quantity manipulation needs no price anomaly to work, which is why price benchmarking alone will never surface it. The reconciliation that does surface it uses weight, freight charges and container capacity to make the document set contradict itself.
- [Multiple invoicing: the anomaly that exists only between two files](https://tbml.ai/insights/multiple-invoicing-typology-explained.md): One genuine shipment, billed more than once, usually through different banks. No individual payment is anomalous, which is the point: the discrepancy exists only in a comparison nobody is assigned to make.

## Optional

- [All insights](https://tbml.ai/insights): browsable index of every article.
- [Full text](https://tbml.ai/llms-full.txt): every article's complete text in one file.
- [RSS feed](https://tbml.ai/rss.xml): new articles as they publish.
- [Home](https://tbml.ai): about the platform.
- Contact: hello@nerous.ai