Financial Crime Online

 Iraq is a place where soldiers fight a war. And it is a place where all sorts of individuals and companies seek opportunities to make a quick profit. The US spend about a billion dollars a day on the war. Imagine the business side of that. How to organize your vendor management in such a [...]

Law enforcement arrested 20 people across the globe, but predominantly in Italy, in a plot to defraud banks as HSBC and (now broke) Lehman Bros. The mafia does not get involved if it is about change; at stake was $2.2 billion. Among those arrested during yesterday’s international bust was Leonardo Badalamenti, son of famous Cosa [...]

The BBC reported on rumors that owners of ships themselves are involved in the pirating business. Like the maritime equivalent of the better know plots of the new lover of a woman “kidnapping” her (with her consent) to get the ransom from her current husband. This scenario was designed to run off together in the [...]

Earlier this month, two former Bank of China managers were sentenced in a Nevada court in the US to over 20 years in jail for defrauding the Bank of China and laundering the funds through US bank accounts and casinos in Las Vegas. The two men are accused of sending millions of dollars in illegal [...]

Living in a house full of cash.. A dream come true? It can be more of a nightmare. Last week, a 41-year-old officer of the NYPD has been arrested in Manhattan on charges of conspiring and attempting to rob an apartment in Manhattan to obtain approximately $900,000 that a former occupant of the apartment, a [...]

Some dry financial crime numbers (will compensate this post with a more frivolous post later). The Minister of Finance in the Netherlands, Europe, asked the Netherlands’ Association of Bankers to compile data on debit card skimming. The total fraud loss on debit card skimming for Dutch banks is estimated @ 0.023% of total transaction volume, [...]

The UN “Oil for Food” program has become quite notorious. The UN Security Council established the Oil-for-Food program in 1995 “as a temporary measure to provide for the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people” while economic sanctions remained in place. In 2004, NY Times reported that “In its final years in power, Saddam Hussein’s government [...]

What is going on? No more Colombian white? Turkish brown?  As one official put it: “Sicily is blessed with sun and wind, but it is also cursed by the Mafia.” That Sicilian wind is useful because it can generate wind energy; for the mafia we still haven’t found a use (although you could argue it [...]

European Union monitors were posted at the Egyptian border of Rafah to oversee controls related to smuggling cash by Hamas in 2006. For regular travelers entering Gaza through Rafah, sums over NIS 80,000 shekels ($19,000) must be declared. Diplomats estimated that Hamas, whose government is restricted by U.S. and EU sanctions, has managed to bring [...]

The Nigerian/419/advance fee fraud is not our favorite topic. Why not?  Because it is still there, after decades, virtually unchanged. Boring. But still a multi million dollar fraud and money laundering business. Although a lot of people blame law enforcement for not getting the problem under control, it will take public private partnerships to tackle [...]