Trying to define money laundering is similar to the experience of the three blind men who once approached an elephant. The first put his arms around its leg and said: "The elephant is like a tree." The second touched its trunk and said: "The elephant is like a snake." The third grabbed its tail and said: "The elephant is like a rope." When it comes to money laundering, we are in much the same position as the three blind men. At the street level in the drug trade, money laundering can take the form of an innocent-looking grandmother who is acting as a smurf injecting dirty cash into the banking system through a series of innocuous-seeming small transactions. Higher up the ladder, it can look like a successful import-export company wiring a payment abroad for goods it appears to have either purchased or sold in a foreign market. In fact, the invoice is either false or grossly inflated. And the company is simply moving dirty money offshore. At the top, money laundering can take the appearance of a well-heeled foreign businessman wanting to invest in a Canadian project. Or a Canadian business person wanting to reduce his taxes through the use of tax havens. Little would anyone suspect that his venture capital originated on the street in simple drug buys. Money laundering is an elusive, chameleon-like process one that is as hard to detect as it is to prevent. In the words of one bank security official: "It's like nailing jelly to a wall." Money laundering is a kind of financial filter. Funds to be camouflaged enter at one end and emerge at the other with their pedigrees carefully disguised. Concealment is not enough, however. The origins of those funds need to be so obscured that they can be used without raising the least suspicion