Financial Crime Online

Now hear this. On 10 April 2010 a Tupolev aircraft of the Polish Air Force crashed near the city of Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 people on board. These included the Polish president Lech Kaczyński and his wife, the chief of the Polish General Staff and other senior Polish military officers, the president of the [...]

A former employee of Pamrapo Savings Bank was arrested by IRS agents on June 2 and charged with diverting and embezzling more than $600,000 from the  New Jersey-based bank. According the the details published in the public domain to date, the scheme was quite simple. In a complex banking environment, he asked business partners to [...]

The Quadrangle Group agreed to pay $ 12 million to settle allegations of paying kickbacks to get business from a NY pension fund. The investment firm will pay $ 7 million to the pension fund and $ 5 million to the SEC. News of the settlement came on the same day that the state comptroller, [...]

The SEC claims that Goldman created and sold to its clients a mortgage unit that was devised to fail ,without telling clients that the set up was for the portfolio to fail. Within half an hour after this announcement, Goldman’s share price dropped 10% (or over $ 10 billion). The SEC alleges that one of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

‘Fort Lauderdale Attorney Charged in Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme’. This headline would probably have hit you harder in a pre-Madoff era. But even now this is quite an impressive allegation. The FBI and IRS seek to confiscate $1.2 billion, including (the usual) ferraris, roll’s royces, yachts, houses, jewelry, bank accounts in Morocco and Gibraltar and what [...]

A Pa. lawyer, Mr. Karoly, was convicted of fraud and money laundering. Prosecutors claimed that the lawyer and his brothers faked a will to collect “a significant portion” of his brother’s and sister-in-law’s multi-million dollar estates after they were killed in a Feb. 2, 2007 plane crash. Other than that, the U.S. District Judge said [...]