Money Mule

A money mule is an account or address that receives illicit funds and quickly forwards them onward to help disguise the origin of the money.

A money mule is a pass-through — an address whose behavior is to receive value and move it along rather than hold or use it, deliberately lengthening the laundering chain. In fund-flow tracing, mules show up as short-lived hops with balanced in-and-out flows and little other activity. Entity clustering links mules operated by the same network, and on-chain labels mark them so investigators can distinguish a mule hop from a genuine counterparty. Recognizing mules keeps the counterparty graph honest and prevents their volume from distorting an exposure breakdown, since the risk belongs to the true source, not the mule.