Financial Crime Online

Ikea has always had the reputation to combat corruption to the max. It launched its first store in Russia in 2000. That launch was hindered by bureaucracy  and ‘bribe seeking’ attention from local officials. 7 years later, Ikea still faces the same hurdles each time it opens a store location:
The store’s opening has reportedly been [...]

How can you use stolen bank data? Or rather: who can use stolen  bank data? Last month a member of staff with HSBC allegedly took client files from his employer and ‘provided’ them to French authorities. The French were keen for the data for tax purposes; amongst HSBC clients in Switzerland there are a lot [...]

Remember reports last year that Al Qaeda was in the worst state from a financial point of view since years? We should also remember Sun Tzu: no matter how weak your enemy has become; crush your enemy before he regains strength.
“We need to redouble our efforts to combat the financial support networks of al Qaeda [...]

Usually hawaladers come from the East. This time he came from the South. The owner of Bem Brazil in Danbury (CT) was sentenced to 30 months in prison for unlicensed money transfers. The indictment alleged that, in exchange for remitting more than $22,000,000 from Connecticut to Brazil and for guaranteeing the anonymity of both their [...]

This week the FBI announced the results of one of the largest FCPA investigation ever. Moreover, it was a full scale undercover investigation; for FCPA cases that is a large step.

“This ongoing investigation is the first large-scale use of undercover law enforcement techniques to uncover FCPA violations and the largest action ever undertaken by [...]

A disaster earthquake hit Haiti. Over a 110.000 people lost their lives. A lot more are homeless and without all basic needs. The world is helping by donating food. And money. Life has always been tough in Haiti, except for the lucky few.
Corruption is a big issue in Haiti. In 2006 it was rated as [...]

Old fashioned ‘hacking’… A gambling addict in the UK showed how easy it is to circumvent some bank’s security controls. He collected a lot of personal information of random individuals; he researched details such as mothers’ maiden names and people’s first schools at the General Register Office for Scotland in Edinburgh. After having retrieved a [...]

Hacking and banking; 2009 was full of it. Law enforcement was able to capture a ring of hackers responsible for some major 2008 bank data thefts and subsequent fraudulent transactions. ‘Hacking and fraudulent banking’ is likely attractive enough from a risk/reward point of view to see whole floods of hackers trying their luck (or testing [...]

In crime reporting the attention is usually drawn to the ‘latest and greatest’. Spectacular stuff. Medicare fraud seems boring; not the place a cop would want to spend his career? Let’s view it from a criminal’s point of view; risk and reward. Medicare fraud nets billions, without the risks of getting shot or ripped. Medicare [...]

There we go: “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar, Mr. Costa, has told the Observer.” Leave it to UNODC to help bloggers and the press to come up with interesting headlines.
The head of the UN Office [...]