Lloyds Banking Group Uses Quantum Computing to Target Money Mules

Money mules use personal accounts to transfer fraud proceeds for criminal groups, with transaction links often concealed within vast payment networks and difficult for conventional systems to identify early. Lloyds Bank said on September 10, 2024, that it had identified more than 160,000 mule accounts and intercepted over £114 million since establishing a specialist team in 2018, underscoring the need for stronger detection.

Lloyds Banking Group announced on April 7, 2026, that it had completed a nine-month experiment with IBM. The companies embedded one known money mule in anonymized real-world transaction data and tested several algorithms using 152 qubits on IBM's 156-qubit Quantum Heron device, successfully identifying the target. The work remains a research proof of concept and has not yet been formally deployed.