Financial crimes

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.

U.S. Supreme Court justices questioned the legality of stiff penalties the federal government says it can impose on people who fail to file required reports listing their foreign bank accounts.

ING said it is aware of the Payvision probe but is not itself a subject of this investigation.

Labor costs constitute a major piece of banks' spending on preventing financial crimes despite technological advancements, and costs are leveling off despite new legislation. Here's why.

While the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has finalized some Corporate Transparency Act rules, the timetable is unclear for regulations involving customer due diligence or database access for banks.

A new Treasury Department request for comment invites the public to weigh in on how cryptocurrencies are used in illegal activities. It's part of the Biden administration's larger push to create a regulatory framework for digital assets.

As Treasury cracks down on DeFi, observers say merging the worlds of traditional and decentralized finance is an increasingly impossible dream.

After the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency cracked down on a $2.8 billion-asset bank, industry observers expect more scrutiny of the ties between banks and financial technology startups.

It remains to be seen what the capped price for Russian oil will be or whether the move will stabilize world energy prices.

The 2012 order, which came alongside fines to U.S. authorities totaling nearly $2 billion, had sullied the London-based bank's reputation. "Over the last decade HSBC's employees have worked hard to transform the bank's financial crime risk management capabilities," HSBC says.