Women used as ‘central figures’ for transnational extremist financing

By Brett McKay, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Investigative Journalism Foundation

Following Canada’s designation of several far-right groups as terrorist entities, ideological extremists have adapted their fundraising and financing methods, with women increasingly acting as the “soft introduction” to hate movements on social media and as central nodes for international financing networks.

According to a report from the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (Fintrac), obtained by the Investigative Journalism Foundation, ideologically motivated violent extremism (IMVE) groups have increasingly turned to crowdfunding platforms, money service businesses and cryptocurrency to keep cash flowing to organizations at home and abroad. The national financial intelligence unit also said it has continued to observe examples of “women acting as central figures” in these terrorist financing efforts.

The report updates Fintrac’s 2020 financial profile of ideological extremism in Canada, which largely focused on the activities of the Proud Boys, Atomwaffen Division, Three Percenters and other groups the federal government added to its list of terrorist entities in 2021.

After these designations, the report says intelligence agencies stepped up monitoring of IMVE groups, including issuing a bulletin on “key patterns and characteristics in the IMVE-related financing activities of lone actors, cross-border networks, and organized threat actors,” and directing banks and other businesses to include the term “#IMVE” in their suspicious activity reports. Anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing measures were also extended to capture transactions on crowdfunding and online payment services.

Women have continued to play a key role in “the financing of IMVE activities in transnational networks, as both donors and facilitators of transactions,” Fintrac found. The role of women in the male-dominated far-right milieu varies across groups and ranges from public-facing fundraising efforts to serving as “central nodes in raising or dispersing donations to IMVE networks.”

Two other documents produced by Canadian intelligence agencies give additional insight into the “paradoxical patterns” of the roles of women in fundamentally misogynistic hate movements.

Fintrac’s 2020 analysis, now publicly available through the IJF’s Open by Default database, notes that neo-Nazis, militias and other far-right organizers often use women as a “soft introduction” to their movements. While women rarely carry out violent attacks themselves, they “often facilitate or sustain violent action as facilitators, supporters or promoters of IMVE networks or groups.”

A 2023 strategic intelligence brief from Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC) warns of the active role women play in promoting hate networks by creating social media and streaming content that hides extremist rhetoric behind “benign narratives” about motherhood and “traditional” values.

“These women foster a sense of community and create spaces that put their followers at ease, thereby normalizing and mainstreaming extremist rhetoric,” the ITAC report explains.

The leveraging of this female-fronted hate content also coincides with the integration of social media networks with cryptocurrency and crowdfunding platforms as the go-to financing mechanisms for extremist networks.

Canadians who are providing financial support to extremist groups abroad are using money services businesses, payment processing platforms and cryptocurrency to facilitate their donations, the report says. Fintrac also observed “multiple transactions to individuals in cross-border networks acting as likely financing nodes, consolidating and raising funds for terrorist groups abroad.”

Social media channels are increasingly being used to spread fundraising campaigns on formal crowdfunding websites and to solicit funds through chat forums or messaging apps by directing donors to bank account numbers or cryptocurrency wallet addresses, according to Fintrac. Both methods make it more difficult for money laundering and terrorist financing offences to be investigated and enforced.

The underlying distrust of traditional banking systems among anti-government groups and the need to veil their online activity to avoid arrest have fostered a “notable emerging trend” of cryptocurrency use in IMVE spaces. Fintrac’s analysis of open-source intelligence reporting references ideologically motivated extremists in Europe “soliciting cryptocurrency donations from international supporters as an example of the growing comfort with virtual currencies within loose IMVE networks.”

Further details about the European group in the report are redacted, as is a section on the use of cryptocurrency by accelerationist neo-Nazi groups, “which seek to hasten the collapse of Western society.”

The adoption and integration of cryptocurrency “to solicit online donations or receive payments, in addition to traditional financial channels, could expand the financial options available to IMVE threat actors,” the report concludes.

IMVE-related attacks in Canada have killed 26 people and injured more than 40 since 2014. Most of these attacks continue to be carried out by so-called lone actors, people who receive no known assistance from a group.

In contrast to the elaborate cross-border financing schemes associated with some extremist networks, Fintrac found the financial footprint of lone actors “was small, characterized by low-cost and low-sophistication activities.”