Years spent hunting for red flags can rewire the way compliance professionals see the world. Unusual transactions, oddly phrased emails and businesses that never seem to have customers become impossible to ignore, even outside office hours.
That heightened awareness can protect people, but as AML software provider Alessa has discovered, it can also backfire.
The firm has launched a new series, “You Know You Work in Compliance When…”, collecting stories from professionals whose instincts refused to clock off. The first came from inside its own team.
An Alessa employee overheard her mother sharing personal details on the phone and intervened with a single question: “Did you call them, or did they call you?” Her mother replied, “They called me,” which was enough to trigger a full fraud-prevention response and an instruction to hang up.
Her logic was sound, as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) identifies unsolicited callers requesting sensitive information as a classic sign of phone scams. On this occasion, however, the caller was a legitimate insurer, and her mother was buying additional life insurance. The beneficiary of that policy was the employee herself.
After the story was shared on social media, other compliance professionals came forward with their own examples. One said the quickest way to explain anti-money laundering (AML) work is to ask: “Have you seen Ozark? We try to catch people like Jason Bateman.”
Another described receiving a 1am “unusual activity” alert, only to find a relative had used the wrong card to buy their birthday present. A third admitted making an entirely voluntary site visit to a local bakery that always seemed suspiciously empty, noting that steady revenue without visible customers is a textbook warning sign for cash-intensive businesses.
Vigilance can also spread across whole teams. One organisation reported that staff flagged their own security training email as phishing because it contained a spelling mistake, a hallmark of fraudulent messages according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). By most measures, the training worked.
Some instincts go further still. One parent, unable to reach their daughter for 30 minutes after her shift, contacted police to raise the possibility of human trafficking. Another recalled once writing jokes such as “for the body disposal” or “mob payment” in e-Transfer memo fields, and now wonders how many transaction monitoring alerts and false positives those messages generated for analysts.
The lighter tone masks a serious point for the RegTech sector. Effective compliance depends on professionals who question what others overlook, yet that same mindset illustrates why false positives remain a costly operational burden for financial institutions. Calibrating human judgement and automated monitoring to separate genuine risk from noise is central to the industry’s challenge.
Read the full Alessa post here.
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