Reported by: Mengqi Sun The Treasury Department’s anti-money-laundering whistleblower program, which was established in 2021 but has been viewed as lacking teeth, got a shakeup in the recent omnibus spending bill that lawyers predict will result in more whistleblower cases. The legislation, which President Biden signed into law in late December, contains major changes to the Treasury […]
Reported by: FINRA FINRA published today its 2023 Report on FINRA’s Examination and Risk Monitoring Program to provide member firms with key insights and observations to use in strengthening their compliance programs. New Topics Covered in the Report: Additionally, the report introduces a newFinancial Crimes section, consisting of three topics — Cybersecurity and Technological Governance; […]
Reported by: Michael DeSantis Lawrence Isen, 69, of San Diego, California, conspired with a boiler room operation based in Melville to cost elderly investors millions of dollars, the DOJ said. From 2014 to 2016, Isen, Chartier and others working with the Melville boiler room artificially inflated the price and trading volume of stock in struggling […]
Reported by: Jonathan Guthrie Nations challenged by the so-called “tyranny of the dollar” are quietly buying gold to replace foreign currency in reserves or for other purposes. Russia springs to mind: most of its government institutions, banks and bigwigs are covered by sanctions. China is also subject to a growing raft of trade curbs amid […]
Reported by: Daniel Flatley Brian Nelson, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, will go to Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego this month to warn banks against overcompliance such as cutting people off from services over fears of running afoul of sanctions. His push highlights a challenge the US faces with sanctions: Successive administrations have […]
Reported by: Douglas MacMillan and Tory Newmyer Federal prosecutors are examining American hedge funds’ dealings with cryptocurrency exchange Binance as part of a long-running investigation into potential violations of money-laundering rules at one of the world’s leading crypto companies. In subpoenas sent in recent months, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of Washington […]
Reported by: Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York A criminal complaint was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging Aurelien Michel, a French national residing in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with defrauding purchasers of “Mutant Ape Planet” NFTs, a type of digital asset, of more than $2.9 million […]
Reported by: Chris Prentice The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is seeking details about FTX investors’ due diligence, according to two sources familiar with the inquiry, as fallout from the crypto firm’s collapse spreads. The SEC has so far brought charges against three of FTX’s top executives, accusing them defrauding investors in the crypto trading platform […]
Reported by: Zahra Tayeb US prosecutors in New York have put together an FTX Task Force to nail down and recover billions of dollars of missing funds belonging to the collapsed crypto exchange’s customers. More than 1 million customers could be affected by what the US government has described as an epic fraud at FTX. […]
Reported by: MILES COHEN and NADINE EL-BAWAB William “Rick” Singer, the ringleader in a college admissions cheating scandal that spanned the country, was sentenced to 42 months in prison by a federal judge on Wednesday. Singer will then be on supervised release for three more years. The former college admissions consultant pleaded guilty in March […]
Financial Crime News Briefs 