After a two-year investigation, the United Kingdom (UK) Metropolitan Police have frozen 25 accounts, possibly linked to the Italian mafia, holding more than €1.9 million. This is a victory for UK anti-money laundering enforcers and the Met. Detective Superintendent Nick Stevens, of the Met's Economic Crime Command, said "This case…

AUSTRAC, Australia's anti-money laundering(AML) regulator, stated that Westpac bank contravened the AML/CFT act on 23 million occasions. Australia’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing act requires entities, like banks, to report on transactions valued at more than $10,000 and to identify those using bank accounts. Westpac is now expecting a $900…

National emergencies, such as the current COVID-19 situation, can effect everyone in dozens of ways. Not often considered is the increase of financial crime by bad actors hoping to take advantage of a bad situation. Even in the best of times, financial crime is always present. When reporting and regular…

Last week, the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA) handed out a record fine of 4 billion crowns to Sweden's oldest retail bank. The FSA claims that Swedbank had some serious deficiencies in their anti money laundering (AML) procedures and withheld important information from the FSA. An effective AML compliance program…

Early this month, the United States government charged two Chinese nationals claiming that the defendants helped North Korea launder almost $100 million worth of stolen digital assets. Cryptocurrency laundering has become a global problem since cryptocurrencies became common-use. These funds only represent a portion of those stolen in 2018 by…

The U.S. Department of Treasury has issued the 2020 National Strategy for Combating Terrorist and Other Illicit Financing. This strategy guides the public and private sectors in addressing current illicit finance challenges. Some of the key illicit finance threats identified include; drug trafficking, terrorist financing, organized crime, human trafficking, and…

Jamal El-Hindi spoke at the 20th annual Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Financial Crimes Conference in New York earlier this month. El-Hindi is the FinCEN Deputy Director and covered some of the AML compliance challenges and trends. One of the focuses was on Section 314(b) information sharing, which permits financial institutions…

In October 2019, Halkbank was charged with money laundering, bank fraud, and sanctions offenses by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The state-owned Turkish bank is suspected of evading Iran sanctions restrictions enforced by the U.S. in a multibillion-dollar scheme. The court issued a summons directing…

It seems that every year, more anti-money laundering penalties are handed down by regulators. However it may seem, the numbers prove that regulators almost doubled the value amount of penalties being handed out from 2018 to 2019. In 2018, 29 fines valued at $4.27 billion were handed out.  Last year,…

Last week, 7 individuals were arrested from the result of a anti-money laundering (AML) investigation in Northern Ireland. This international AML investigation involved Europol, Interpol, the Republic of Ireland, and Great Britain and culminated in eight searches performed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland. This was the second biggest…