A mother receives her monthly food-assistance benefit, heads to the store and swipes her card—only to find the balance is gone. Someone has skimmed the card number and stolen the funds.
For Karen Arrabal, senior director of financial crimes and investigations at Fifth Third Bank, that kind of transaction is never just a data point or an alert. "There's a person on the other side of that transaction," she says. "That means a kid doesn't eat because the money was stolen from them."
That human perspective guides Arrabal's work in anti-money laundering and fraud investigations for Fifth Third's customers and its Midwest regional communities. Her expertise is driving new efforts to connect financial data with nationwide efforts to disrupt human trafficking and the distribution of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM).
Last year, she led an initiative that brought together Fifth Third with law enforcement, data scientists and global nonprofit partners, including
"In almost every crime there's a financial nexus, and so if you follow the paper trail, you follow the money, you can really understand crime in a much different way," said Arrabal.
Arrabal, a criminology major with deep roots in AML and anti-fraud measures, was with Fifth Third in 2016 when her initial work in AML and customer due diligence led to her building and refining financial crime programs. She attained her current role in 2022.
Her expertise has raised her profile within the industry, sharing anti-fraud and investigative models and detection infrastructure strategies that provide her peer network lessons on what works—and what doesn't. "We rely on each other within the different financial institutions of learning," she says.
Arrabal has shared her expertise at forums hosted by the FBI, the American Bankers Association and the Risk Management Association, helping shape training on red flags, open-source investigations and techniques for connecting fragmented data.
Events from her own life spurred the recent drive to build out a network of partners in the fight against CSAM/human trafficking. Three years ago,
Looking ahead, Arrabal said she plans to keep pushing the frontier of detection, staying aligned with FinCEN and US Treasury priorities while exploring new typologies tied to emerging fraud schemes.
She will continue to do her work mostly from her home base in the D.C. area, which now includes a newly purchased, century-old home she and her husband plan to renovate.
