Financial Crime Online

Another high profile “PEP” investigation. Arafat’s former aide has been accused of funneling millions of public funds abroad. The money allegedly was wired from Palestinian Investment Fund bankaccounts to accounts held by shell companies under his control. In 2009, CBS reported on secret accounts in Israel (..) and Switzerland held by the Palestinian Investment Fund. Check [...]

Think of Iran and financial crime; you were thinking about sanctions and OFAC right? Did we forget that Iran has its fair share of fraudsters as well?  Asides from election fraud and what not, ‘from for the money’ has been around in Persia for a while. Following arrests that took place around September last year, [...]

Rajina Rita Subramaniam gets 15 years for defrauding ING in Australia. The accountant at ING led a ‘normal’ life in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, in the eyes of many. But she defrauded ING of around $45 over the course of years. According to the SMHreport, Subramaniam made 200 illegal transfers in the course of [...]

UBS stock took a 7% hit today after the news was published that a rogue trader had been arrested. A 31 year old London based UBS broker allegedly surprised his employer with a $2 billion loss due to unauthorized trading. Who doubted that banks took risk management extremely serious after the mortgage crisis and Kerviel [...]

The US DOJ reported that former (JP Morgan) vice president James Hertz ´Pleads Guilty for Role in Bid-rigging and Fraud Conspiracies Involving Municipal Bonds´. JP Morgan was was a provider of investment agreements and other municipal finance contracts, such as swaps, to public entities. Public entities typically hire a broker to conduct a competitive bidding [...]

So let’s say you made a mistake and invested your money in a ponzi scheme. By the time you find out about your mistake, the bad guy is probably broke. How to recoup your money. Sue the bank; that is where the money is. Not your money (that went to boats, juwelry, cars, real estate [...]

Another rogue banker…. This banker at the Oberbank in Austria is reported to have embezzled over 8 million euros of client’s funds. Internal controls apparently did not pick up the abnormalities until this month while the fraud started in May 2008. The banker allegedly forged client’s signatures to transfer money to accounts in Hungary to [...]

The police in Gurgaon arrested a Citibank relationship banker, Shivraj Puri, in a multi ($70m) million dollar fraud. Puri allegedly opened over 70 bankaccounts in his name and in the name of relatives with several banks in India. The banker lured high net worth clients of Citibank into a bogus Citibank investment program. He promised [...]

BadB; not a gangsta rapper but allegedly a credit card fraud kingpin. Vladislav Horohorin, 27 years old, has a Ukrainian and Israeli passport and is the main suspect in an US led undercover investigation. BadB has been around (on the internet) for years bragging and boosting about his fraud. He has been offering stolen credit [...]

It is one of a bank’s worst nightmare. And it probably is one of yours. Imagine someone that can access your personal financial data to steal it and abuse it. Banks do (almost?) everything they can to prevent unauthorized access to your data but bank staff themselves obviously need to have access to your data [...]