Lloyds tests quantum computing to crack money mule networks

Lloyds Banking Group has completed the first-known experiment into how quantum computing could help to identify money mules, Finextra reports.

Over the nine-month project, this team worked alongside Lloyds’ economic crime prevention experts and IBM’s specialists to explore how quantum computing could one day help uncover complex fraud patterns that can be challenging for traditional computers to detect.

The experiment tested multiple quantum algorithms to see whether patterns of known money mule behaviour could be identified within a larger transactional graph. The team used anonymised data on one of IBM’s 156-qubit quantum computers.

The solution successfully identified a real money mule that had been deliberately embedded in the data to validate the approach, demonstrating how real-world financial crime challenges could be tackled in the future using algorithms running on quantum computers.

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