Which mule accounts do you freeze? A checked minimum cut on a 4.49-million-transfer FalkorDB graph, and a max-flow bug I hit
After a scam alert lands on a mule account, "is this account bad" is already answered. The useful question comes next: the money is moving, so which few accounts do you freeze so it loses its routes out, without locking half the bank? That is a question about how accounts connect, so I built Chokepoint for Graph Hacks on FalkorDB. It runs on IBM's synthetic anti-money-laundering transfers: 5.08…
The article discusses a tool called Chokepoint that helps determine which mule accounts to freeze in order to cut off money laundering routes. The author built this tool using FalkorDB, which they discovered had a bug in its maxFlow algorithm. The maxFlow algorithm is used to find a minimum cut in a graph, which would freeze the accounts to stop money laundering.
However, the bug caused the maxFlow algorithm to sometimes return a cut with a lower value than the true maximum, resulting in incorrect freezing of accounts. The author found that this bug affected about 12-17% of the networks they tested, which impacted the accuracy of the freezing recommendations. The issue was due to the presence of infinite capacity edges in the network, which should not be part of the minimum cut.
The author fixed this issue by adjusting the capacity and re-tested the results. They also added a check to compare the FalkorDB results with an exact NetworkX solver to ensure the accuracy of their tool.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
