Financial crimes

Toronto-Dominion Bank is on the hook for $1.2 after settling litigation over its connection to a massive Ponzi scheme, and Independent Bank Group in Texas agreed to pay $100 million. A third bank, HSBC, settled for a smaller amount.

Under the new policy, firms that come forward with misconduct before it becomes known to the public or prosecutors and then fully cooperate will receive "significant benefits" in any resulting deal, federal prosecutors in New York say.

In the aftermath of Louisiana's largest bank failure, Ashton Ryan Jr. was convicted on all 46 counts against him. U.S. Attorney Duane Evans called the case a "theft of epic proportions."

A judge said he would approve Deutsche Bank's $26.3 million settlement of a lawsuit that accused the bank of misleading investors about how thoroughly it vetted clients, including Jeffrey Epstein and Russian tycoons.

The company settled with the Federal Reserve after self-reporting that it had disbursed $1.1 million in wrongfully obtained Paycheck Protection Program loans.

Authorities gained from Russian sanctions legislation helped law enforcement build the case against Hong Kong-based exchange.

Thieves have become adept at exploiting digital vulnerabilities, conducting heists that resulted in more than $3 billion in losses last year.

Burdensome regulations have decimated correspondent banking relationships, harming the most vulnerable in the U.S. and abroad.

Rules being considered by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network would needlessly hinder banks seeking to do due diligence on their customers.

Danske Bank A/S admitted to fraud and agreed to forfeit $2 billion to end a long-running U.S. probe into money laundering at its Estonia branch, an embarrassing episode that led to the ouster of top management and pushed thousands of customers to leave.

Santander UK was fined £108 million ($132 million) by the U.K. financial watchdog over repeated anti-money-laundering failures that included a series of missteps over its monitoring of hundreds of millions of pounds of suspicious funds.

Marijuana shops across the U.S. are rushing to find alternative ways for customers to pay after networks that supported a popular workaround to the banking system began to shut down last week.

By one estimate, fraud increases 25% between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. Banks and credit unions are reaching out to help customers avoid the scams.

Long before Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX cryptocurrency empire collapsed this month, it already was on the radar of federal prosecutors in Manhattan.

After a Texas bank settled allegations by the Department of Justice, experts were split about the extent of the exposure for banks and fintechs that took part in the pandemic-era program.

Former Goldman Sachs Group banker Asante Berko was arrested on charges that he orchestrated bribes to Ghanaian officials while employed at the investment bank.

Scams against the elderly are responsible for more than $3 billion in losses each year, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Credit unions say they are seeing more cases, and often the hardest part is getting the victims to admit they've been taken advantage of.

UBS Group's Frankfurt and Munich offices are being searched by prosecutors as part of a money laundering investigation linked to the sanctioned Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, people familiar with the probe said. 

Deutsche Bank was told by the German financial watchdog BaFin that it must fix its controls within given deadlines if it wants to avoid a financial punishment.

The central bank terminated a cease-and-desist order issued against the Agricultural Bank of China and its New York branch in 2016 for breaking anti-money-laundering rules.