What is a money mule?
Stolen money has to land somewhere, and it lands in accounts belonging to real people who mostly thought they were doing something else.
Layers of ordinary accounts, each one belonging to a real person.
Why criminals need them
Stolen money is useless while it sits in an account traceable to the theft. It has to be moved, quickly, through accounts that look ordinary, before anyone freezes anything.
Opening accounts fraudulently at scale is hard and getting harder, because onboarding checks have improved. Recruiting people who already have accounts is far easier. So the bottleneck in fraud is not stealing the money; it is having somewhere legitimate for it to land.
That is why the fifty-fifty liability split in the UK's APP reimbursement rules was significant. By making receiving banks share the cost, it gave them a direct financial reason to care about mule accounts on their own books, which had previously been someone else's problem.
How recruitment actually looks
Rarely as a criminal proposition. Usually as something else entirely:
A job advert for a payment processing or financial administration role, working from home, that involves receiving funds and forwarding them. A message offering money for the use of your account, framed as helping someone who cannot open one. A friend or partner asking for a favour. An online contact who has spent weeks building a relationship first.
Students, new arrivals to a country, and people in financial difficulty are targeted most, because the offer is designed to look like a solution.
The tell is always the same underneath the story: money you did not earn arrives in your account, and you are asked to move it on and keep a share. No legitimate employer, ever, needs your personal bank account to process their payments.
What actually happens to the person
The consequences are heavier than most people expect, and they are not primarily about the money.
The account is closed, and the closure is recorded on shared industry databases. That frequently makes opening an account anywhere else difficult for years, which in practice means difficulty receiving a salary, renting, or getting credit.
Prosecution is possible, because handling the proceeds of crime is a criminal offence in most jurisdictions and it does not require knowing the specific origin of the funds. Recklessness is generally enough.
And the money is gone. Mules are usually asked to forward funds before anyone notices, so the person who kept a hundred as a cut may be pursued for thousands they passed on.
If money you were not expecting arrives, the correct action is to leave it alone and contact the bank. Moving it is the thing that creates the problem.
Letting someone use your address for parcels. It costs you nothing, you are only passing them along, and you never look inside. When it turns out what was in them, the packaging is gone, the goods are gone, and the only fixed point in the whole arrangement is your name on the address label.
Where you meet it
Every too-good job advert involving receiving payments at home. Every account closed without a detailed explanation. Every warning campaign aimed at students at the start of term, which is not an accident.