Reported by Nate Sibley of Hudson Institute How Cartels Launder Money Now Fake pills containing fentanyl. Photo Credit: DEA For decades, cartels laundered money primarily by smuggling bulk cash across the border or using the Black Market Peso Exchange. The latter involved using drug profits to purchase goods in the United States, shipping them across the border, […]
Reported by Andrea Shalal and David Lawder Senior officials from the United States, Europe and Britain met on Thursday with financial institutions to brief them on efforts by Russia to evade Western sanctions imposed over its invasion of Ukraine, a senior U.S. Treasury official told reporters. The firms – from the United States, Britain and […]
Reported by BEN WEISS Nikhil Wahi, a 27-year-old crypto trader whose brother worked for Coinbase, has agreed to pay $469,525.50 to the publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange for his role in an insider-trading scheme. The court filing, which was signed April 6, was made public Monday. In September, Wahi agreed to a plea deal with the Department […]
Reported by Kaley Schafer of Ballard Spahr LLP On March 30, 3023, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a Financial Trend Analysis focusing on business email compromise (BEC) trends and patterns in the real estate sector (referred to as “RE BEC”). The report is required under Section 6206 of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 (AMLA). This section […]
Reported by EURACTIV.com with AFP File photo. External view of the offices of Swiss medicine maker Novartis in Athens, Greece, 4 January 2017. [Alexandros Vlachos/EPA] Switzerland has matched the 10 rounds of ever-tightening sanctions imposed by the European Union since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Though Swiss trade with Russia has come […]
Reported by Colin Moynihan In the summer of 2020, Niloufar Bahadorifar, an expatriate Iranian in California, received a message from someone in her home country asking her to send money to the PayPal account of a person in Manhattan. Ms. Bahadorifar passed along $670 and forwarded proof of the transaction to Iran. The payment may […]
Reported by Sean Lyngaas (CNN)A team of South Korean spies and American private investigators quietly gathered at the South Korean intelligence service in January, just days after North Korea fired three ballistic missiles into the sea. For months, they’d been tracking $100 million stolen from a California cryptocurrency firm named Harmony, waiting for North Korean hackers to […]
Reported by Mathew Di Salvo The U.S. Department of the Treasury has warned of criminals using decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols but admitted that money launderers and terrorists typically prefer fiat currencies over crypto. In its “Illicit Finance Risk Assessment of Decentralized Finance” report released today, the U.S. body said that ransomware crooks, thieves, scammers and other criminals […]
Reported by SHALINI NAGARAJAN Source: Shutterstock / Tada Images, modified by Blockworks The Securities and Exchange Commission appears to be close to a settlement agreement with Ishan Wahi, a former product manager at Coinbase who the agency charged and accused of insider trading. In February, Wahi pled guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud […]
Reported by Stephanie Baker The UK’s National Crime Agency has dropped part of its investigation into sanctioned Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman after dramatically raiding his London home and arresting him late last year. The NCA is no longer probing Fridman on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud the UK Home Office and conspiracy to commit perjury, people familiar with the […]
Financial Crime News Briefs 