Money mule
A person whose bank account is used to receive and forward stolen funds, breaking the direct path between the victim and the fraudster. Recruited knowingly through underground channels, or unknowingly through fake job adverts and romance approaches.
Why it matters to you
The institution's word for a role the underground calls a drop. The distinction matters in practice: a mule is a real person with a real account and a real explanation, which is why account opening controls catch so few of them and why the pattern of movement catches more.
Where we meet it
Recruitment advertises itself as legitimate work more often than not: payment processing, a finance assistant role, a package forwarder. The people involved frequently do not know what they are part of until the account is frozen.
Connected terms
Drop
A money or goods mule: the recruited (sometimes unwitting) person whose bank account or address launders the proceeds. Recruited openly, in "work" channels, at scale.
Cashout
The last mile: turning stolen access, cards or balances into money the criminal keeps. Gift cards, crypto, mule accounts, reshipping, each with its own fee and its own specialists.
Synthetic identity
An identity assembled from real fragments and invented ones: a genuine national identifier belonging to somebody who does not use it, paired with a fabricated name, date of birth and address. Built to pass verification rather than to impersonate anyone.
Where this term stops being vocabulary
Dragnet is where you watch it happen to you
Knowing the word is the cheap half. The platform is the half where the term arrives attached to your domain, with a timestamp and the source it came from.
More from the trade
Access listing
The IAB's ad format: industry, country, revenue, access level and price. Everything except the victim's name, which is disclosed to serious buyers in private.
Bot shop
A marketplace that sells the output of one infected machine as a single unit: its cookies, saved passwords, browser fingerprint and time zone, packaged so a buyer can load the lot into an antidetect browser and resume the victim's sessions.
Carding
The trade in stolen payment card data and the craft of turning it into goods: testing cards, choosing merchants, shipping to reshippers. An economy with its own schools, slang and reputations.
Cashout
The last mile: turning stolen access, cards or balances into money the criminal keeps. Gift cards, crypto, mule accounts, reshipping, each with its own fee and its own specialists.