Financial Crime Online

BBC reports that the UK operation of Zurich Insurance has been fined £2.27m by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for losing personal details of 46,000 customers. What happened? During a ‘ routine transfer of data’  to a data storage center in South Africa the data went AWOL. And the insurer didn’t notice the disappearance until [...]

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 [...]

In court documents filed on Monday, US prosecutors revealed that Barclays facilitated payments with a total value of $500 million related to Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma between 1995 and 2006. According to FT, the investigation into Barclays, (and similar probes into Lloyds and Credit Suisse) started in 2008 when US  authorities launched a [...]

Michelle Aiello was sentenced to 15,5 years in prison for being a mafioso and for corruption and fraud (but the last 2 obviously come with the job of being a maffioso). This week the Italian police confiscated his entire business empire with an estimated value of 800 million euro ($1 billion). In the treasure chest [...]

An $8.9 million fine that is. The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) said Tuesday that Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and its subsidiaries failed to properly screen its customers and their transactions during 2008, leading to an “unacceptable risk that RBS could have facilitated transactions involving sanctions targets, including terrorist financing.”. Notice the words ‘could [...]

The enormous demand for 200 and 500 euro bills is great for the Eurozone and the profits of the European Central Bank (ECB) according to the Wall Street Journal today. The ECB is the bank printing the bills. Seigniorage is the technical term for the difference between the nominal value and the production value of [...]

So you want to get money out of an ATM that is not yours. What will be your weapon of choice? Blow it up (and hope that the bills are still worth something and you live to spend them) or start skimming debit cards at an ATM and make counterfeit cards for your personal use? [...]

Now just when you thought it perhaps isn’t as bad as it seems…. Austrian magazin Profil reported that Muammar Kaddafi (or al-Gaddafi; indeed the infamous Libian leader) gave Haider, the late right wing Austrian politician, hundreds of thousands of dollars in tote bags. Profil, based on several sources, claims that the cash was susequently bundled [...]

An interesting spin-off during an investigation by Austrian and German authorities into the near-collapse of Austrian bank  Hypo Group Alpe Adria. The bank was once owned by the Austrian region of Carinthia, which Austrian right wing politician Haider governed until he died in a car crash in 2008. The investigators revealed that Haider had access to [...]

Some significant highlights from a criminal career in the cocaine business; the first time to hit the DEA ‘wanted’ list (with a $5 million price on your head) and the first time to be killed in a shootout with the Mexican army. Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, “Nacho” for friends, was the wingman of Joaquin Guzman, top dog [...]