Advanced EDD and PEP Reviews: SOW, Corruption and Crypto

━━━ DISCLAIMER ━━━

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Move from procedural due diligence to the judgment the hardest files demand.

You already know how to conduct enhanced due diligence. But the files that reach a senior analyst don't fail because a document is missing — they fail because a sophisticated customer has built a story that is plausible, internally consistent, and false. This course is about the judgement needed to work exactly those files: where the evidence is contested, the customer has the resources to construct a convincing account, and your decision has to survive a regulator, an examiner, and a court.

Taught in a practitioner's voice and built around realistic case scenarios in every section, the course develops advanced EDD as a discipline of defensible judgement rather than box-ticking. You'll learn the standard that actually applies — the firm's risk-sensitive satisfaction that it understands a source of wealth, not proof of criminality — and how to weigh contested evidence by reliability, corroboration, and provenance.

What you'll master

• Testing the hardest source-of-wealth claims — complex business sales, inherited and generational wealth, investment gains, and crypto-origin fortunes — against the disinterested witnesses a genuine story leaves behind

• Building corroboration independently from registries, filings, court records, tax trails, and investigative data, rather than relying on what the customer hands over

• Classifying PEPs with precision — uncovering concealed proximity, relatives and close associates, and the state-owned-enterprise officials that clean name-screens routinely miss

• Recognising the real typologies of grand corruption and applying the illicit-enrichment disproportion test to identify unexplained wealth without proving the underlying crime

• Seeing through trusts, foundations, family offices, PPLI wrappers, and citizenship-by-investment to the reality of control and the true source of funds

• Grading contested adverse media — accounting for state-controlled media, disinformation, reputation laundering, and SLAPP suppression

• Corroborating crypto and digital-asset wealth on-chain, splitting a fortune into genuine and uncorroborable tranches, and handling mixer and sanctions exposure

• Navigating cross-border EDD, including data-protection tension, secrecy laws, and blocking statutes — distinguishing a genuine legal barrier from a choice not to cooperate

• Framing every decision against risk appetite: conditional onboarding, monitoring design, senior sign-off, and exit — and knowing when concealment means the answer is decline

• Producing EDD conclusions that survive quality assurance and regulatory examination, informed by how enforcement actions describe programme failures

The capstone

Everything converges in the Adebayo-Volkov File — a single high-net-worth relationship weaving concealed control, an undisclosed wealth event, contested adverse media, crypto-origin wealth, and a cross-border cooperation failure into one decision you must resolve and defend.

Who this is for

EDD, CDD, and KYC analysts ready to step up; financial crime and AML professionals handling high-net-worth, PEP, offshore, and cross-border relationships; MLROs, compliance managers, and QA reviewers; and private banking, wealth management, and fintech compliance staff. A foundational or intermediate grounding in AML is recommended — this is an advanced course.

By the end, you'll have the judgement to work the highest-risk files in the discipline, and to document your decisions so their quality is visible to anyone who reviews them.