Financial Crime Online

Today in Maryland two suspects were arrested in a tiger kidnap scenario. Two men armed with a gun and knife approached the manager of a bank as she arrived at her Clinton home Friday night, police said. They tied her and her husband with electrical cord and held them overnight, police said. Early Saturday morning, [...]

This headline will attract the attention for sure. What is going on in The Netherlands? Wouldn’t it be news if a bank did accept money from drug sales? How come it is news that a bank stops doing that; they should have done that years ago, right ?Let’s start at the beginning. In The Netherlands, [...]

Who would have thought that it was still possible in the world of haute finance? A classic Ponzi scheme on Wall Street. All ‘post Enron’ tough regulations, laws and regulatory efforts apparently could not prevent this; a $50 billion investment fraud.
Wall Street legend, former NASDAQ chairman Bernard Madoff shook the financial markets this week. The [...]

Today the FBI arrested the Illinois governor and his chief of staff on federal corruption charges related in part to the selection of President-elect Barack Obama’s successor to the Senate, the U.S. attorney’s office said. The vacant senate seat was up for the highest bidder according to several sources.One big question now is whether the [...]

Good ol’ Pirates were in it for gold, women and rum. Nowadays they seem to settle for cash. Is it ? How does that work… pirates hijacking a vessel and demanding a ransom. The vessels’ owner jumps in a helicopter and drops a suitcase loaded with dollars on deck ?Pirates can have bankaccounts ofcourse. Or [...]

It affects all walks of life. Unfortunately. Today the mayor of Birmingham (Alabama) was arrested in a corruption probe. An investment banker and a lobbyist were apprehended at the same time. The mayor was the head of a commission at the time it engaged in variable rate, auction and bond swaps to raise money [...]

At first glance, this seems logical: Crime rates should drop during good economic times and rise during bad ones. But there’s little evidence to suggest that good economic times have much effect on crime. Crime rates rose every year between 1955 and 1972, even as the U.S. economy surged, with only a brief, mild recession [...]