Legal issues and news

A three-judge panel determined that a lower-court ruling against two law firms specializing in mortgage repair had used the wrong measure to calculate restitution.

A U.S. probe into Tether is homing in on whether executives behind the digital token committed bank fraud, a potential criminal case that would have broad implications for the cryptocurrency market.

Tech companies that help banks detect money laundering have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in recent months because of advances in their products. Observers suggest the vendors will have to diversify their offerings to survive in a crowded field.

Congress had been close to passing legislation to help banks serve cannabis firms. Now Democratic leaders have all but abandoned the effort, prioritizing a riskier proposal to decriminalize the drug.

The agreement will likely end a three-year-old dispute over allegations that the company misled borrowers by promising no hidden fees on its consumer loans.

Stephen Calk, the former CEO of Federal Savings Bank, wanted to be former President Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary, defense secretary or a top ambassador and approved loans to Trump ally Paul Manafort with that goal in mind, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors have rested their case against onetime bank CEO Stephen Calk, who allegedly approved millions of dollars in loans in exchange for a potential job in the Trump administration. Federal Savings Bank employees have testified against Calk, whose lawyers have sought to shift blame to underlings

The company angered hundreds of customers when its software flagged their accounts as suspicious and suddenly cut them off, according to a ProPublica report. The episode illustrates the challenge shared by fintechs and banks of rooting out scammers without being overzealous.

Fraudsters use different tactics based on their intended victims, and banks like Republic Bancorp and Wells Fargo are targeting the kinds of notices they send — and which channels they direct them to — in response.

Stephen Calk, a Chicago banker, pushed through $16 million in sketchy loans to Donald Trump's onetime campaign manager because he "wanted a powerful government title," Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexandra Rothman said in her opening statement in Calk's criminal bribery trial.

The cloud-based software vendor has completed a $10 million funding round through BlackFin Capital Partners and Picus Capital.

Policymakers need to stop attacking credit bureaus and take action against credit repair firms that use dubious tactics to wipe bad debt from consumers' credit reports. Such schemes both impair banks' ability to accurately underwrite loans and further hurt real victims of identity theft.

A 2017 investigation into the fake-accounts scandal — conducted by the board of directors with a major assist from the law firm Shearman & Sterling — was billed as independent and objective. Was it?

A slew of websites operated by financial institutions, governments and airlines including Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing and Australia’s central bank went down briefly Thursday in the second global internet outage in two weeks.

The Biden administration wants financial institutions to tell the government more about their customers to help the IRS thwart wealthy tax evaders. But critics say the plan could threaten account data security and the privacy of even low-income consumers.

Before its disappearance, Avaddon said it hacked Valley National Bank's network and threatened to leak sensitive data. The bank is still investigating.

Financial firms can minimize the damage by understanding where key threats lie, educating employees and customers about phishing scams, and breaking down silos between compliance, fraud and security teams.

Six Clovers, a digital payments company founded by two former PayPal developers, designed its Rapid platform to enable fast cross-border transactions using cryptocurrencies backed by government-issued money.

The data analytics provider has deployed cloud hosting to scour international payments for signs of fraud and money laundering.