U.S. banks processed roughly $1.2B in ransomware payments in 2021

What this article says is the US banks processed some $1.2 BN in "likely" ransomware payments (see first sentence in the actual story). "Likely" means they did not have enough evidence. They dutifully noticed the authorities, and were faced with a dilemma: what do you do when you don't know for sure if a transaction is legitimate, or crime-related?

That's a conundrum that banks are facing every day. Anti-money laundering is a big department in any bank. It employs all sorts of machine learning (or, if you prefer, AI).

In the end what would you do? The only thing you can do, and anyone can do, is to set a threshold. You will trade off false negatives and false positives. You make sure ten times over that the regulators are happy with your choices. But in the end, the vast majority of your clients are law abiding citizens, and you don't want to have too many false positives and make life hard for them.

Now, is $1.2 BN a large number? It looks like that, but is it really?

I did a quick google, and found this site [1] maintained by the Federal Reserve, which shows the volume of Fedwire transactions. Before clicking on that link, as yourself, how much money do you think the banks move during one year? Is it billions, trillions, quadrillions?

Have you even ever head someone using the word "quadrillion" followed by the word "dollars"? From now on, feel free to start using it, because it's about one quadrillion dollars that banks move every year using the Fedwire system.

[1] https://www.frbservices.org/resources/financial-services/wir...