UAE deploys AI, drones and crypto tracking to stay ahead of financial crime

Abu Dhabi: Drones over ships. Algorithms reading invoices. Police tracing crypto. AI screening more than 25,000 entities. In the UAE, AI is no longer an experiment in safeguarding the financial system.

The question is moving away from 'should we continue' with AI as a proof of concept, to actual scalable solutions that start benefiting us," Mahmoud Alsalah, Partner and Financial Crime Compliance Leader at PwC Middle East said, at a session hosted by the UAE General Secretariat on the third day of the 15th United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, taking place in Abu Dhabi.

During the session, representatives from UAE customs, Abu Dhabi Police, the Ministry of Economy and Tourism and PwC Middle East shared real cases from the ground on how AI is used to screen shipments, trace crypto flows and focus inspections.

Drones over ships and containers

At customs, the change is already visible at borders and ports.

Maryam Amer, Director of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering-Terrorist Financing Department at the Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs and Port Security said inspections have moved from traditional to modern methods.

"We have moved from traditional to modern inspection in customs, by land, sea and even air," she said.

Drones are now used to inspect ships and shipments arriving by sea and air. AI also gives customs officers tools to build risk profiles, and it can flag suspicious patterns such as unusual invoice values and trace where shipments originate.

Cross-border cash declarations are another focus. Money carried across borders can be linked to money laundering, and AI alerts officers when they review those declarations.

"This saves time and effort for the customs official in providing clearance," Amer said.

Tracking crypto and virtual training

For Abu Dhabi Police, the main task is to preserve safety and security, and AI is now part of that work. Major Ali Alnuaimi from Abu Dhabi Police, said the force uses AI in three areas: preventing crime, countering crime, and training and upskilling officers.

The work builds on a national threat assessment carried out in the UAE, which included the regulation of virtual assets, with a focus on fraud and scams. As part of that effort, the General Command of Abu Dhabi Police uses an analysis system that tracks financial assets, including crypto and other virtual assets, by mapping how they flow into and out of the UAE.

The police also run a number of systems that monitor hotspots across the country with a high risk of criminality.

AI is also a training tool. The General Command uses virtual simulations of crimes to train officers to identify, counter and disrupt crime, and to identify offenders who use modern technology to commit it. The aim, Alnuaimi said, is to develop ways to counter those methods.

"The point is to be proactive and ahead of the game when it comes to identifying risk," he said. "We build scenarios to stay ahead."

He stressed that the agencies work as a chain. "The UAE government works as one unit, one part complements the other," he said. Suspicious cases found by customs are referred to the police, "and that is where law enforcement starts."

Volume too large for people to handle

For the Ministry of Economy and Tourism, the challenge is scale. Counselor Salem Ahmed Al Tunaiji, Director of the AML/CFT Department at the Ministry of Economy and Tourism, said his team oversees around 25,000 entities every year, and that there are not enough people to inspect them all.

"We supervise 25,000 entities annually, and there is a shortage of human resources," he said. "Therefore, we opted for a risk assessment approach, which includes the use of AI."

The system supports a national risk assessment carried out every year. It consists of 300 questions, which the private sector answers, and the results feed directly into inspections and training.

"When we speak of 25,000 entities, we need to focus on a number of companies," Al Tunaiji said. The ministry combines the answers with data gathered over the past five years to plan inspections, and to identify whether companies show indicators of suspicious behavior, including in crypto and other virtual assets.

What the system finds also shapes the training plan. Sector-level information is shared within the ministry, and some of the findings are submitted to the General Secretariat.

The next step is to build a mechanism that uses AI to verify the documents that accompany controls and inspections. The volume is too large for people to handle.

Human in the loop

Neither regulators nor banks have fully settled how far AI should go on its own, but Mahmoud Alsalah, Partner and Financial Crime Compliance Leader at PwC Middle East, said there is broad agreement that a human must stay involved, for example when drafting and filing a suspicious activity report.

He also warned about AI's limits. "AI will not give you the response on real beneficial ownership," he said. "It enables you to scan large numbers of data sets," such as KYC records and phone numbers linked to a person over time.

That matters because criminals exploit the gaps between institutions. "A human is not capable of ingesting this much data," Al Salah said, and organizations working in silos will miss the hidden relationships in it.

Three ways across government and private sector

Alsalah said AI is used in three main ways across government and the private sector.

The first, and by far the most common today, is producing summaries and collecting data. AI gathers information from many sources and summarizes documents, so investigators and analysts spend less time collecting material and more time on the actual case.

The second is spotting trends. AI can run across the huge volumes of data available nationally and internationally to identify trends and typologies of financial crime. In areas such as customs and cross-border movements, this helps authorities work out the latest scenarios criminals are using.

The third is autonomous systems, which Al Salah described as the next step and the one being discussed most in depth with banks. As AI moves toward acting on its own, the key question is where to keep the human in the loop.