Money-Mule Detection as a Relational Learning Problem: A Study on the RBIH NFPC Dataset
Abstract: Money-mule networks move criminal funds through many small transfers, each of which looks ordinary on its own. What marks an account as a mule lies outside any single transfer: in the counterparties and addresses its network shares, and in the shape of its activity over time. Production systems remain largely rule-based and see neither, while most research classifies transactions rather than accounts, recovering account-level risk only by aggregating afterwards. We instead score the account directly, reading the bank's relational schema as a heterogeneous graph in which rows are nodes and foreign keys are edges. Each account is scored from a multi-hop neighbourhood using per-column encoders, a relative-time encoding and HeteroGraphSAGE message passing, with that neighbourhood restricted to rows predating the account's own pre-flag cutoff so that no model sees evidence recorded only after the account was flagged. On a five-year Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH) retail-banking dataset of 400 million transactions and 94{,}063 labelled accounts, 2.6\% of them confirmed mules, we compare against RelGNN, XGBoost, LightGBM and CatBoost trained on identical labels, splits and cutoffs. Our detector recovers nine in ten held-out mules at 83\% precision and a 0.5\% false-alarm rate, finding 115 more mules than the strongest tree ensemble given the same evidence. At the tuned thresholds the gap is mostly in recall: XGBoost and LightGBM lead across the first hundred alerts, but only the graph models hold their precision deep into the queue. Since the graph is the schema itself and every score is dated per account, the approach deploys on a bank's existing database without a custom feature graph build.