Financial Crime Online

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 [...]

Most countries ban some types of gambling. The type of gambling ‘games’ that are allowed are usually strictly regulated and mostly (semi) government owned. That does not mean that the odds are fair. In sports betting, game rigging is a real concern. And obviously, when you speak about big bucks, there will be big criminals [...]

Two alleged hackers in their twenties and an unknown “Hacker 3″ have been indicted on charges of hacking into a computer network operated by the Atlanta-based credit card processing company RBS WorldPay.
The indictment alleges that the group used sophisticated hacking techniques to compromise the data encryption that was used by RBS WorldPay to protect customer [...]

Quebec police continued their crackdown on corruption in the province’s construction industry yesterday, arresting 10 people allegedly tied to what authorities say is a vast money-laundering operation headed by the Hells Angels biker gang.  The plan, police say, was to create a consortium of masonry companies as part of a conspiracy to corner the market [...]

On its website, ICE proudly presented the largest cash seizure in Colombia ever: “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agents along with Colombian and Mexican law enforcement officers between Sept. 9 and 18 made the largest bulk cash container seizure in Colombia and the United States – more than $41 million in U.S. currency [...]

In Mallorca (Spain) the police dug up 4.3 million euro ($6.2 million) in cash and 7.5 kilograms of jewelry in Palma de Mallorca. Members of a local drug ring buried the loot, under a doghouse annex garage. The police mentioned that they have been preparing for the bust for a couple of months. The police [...]

The Hindustan Times reported ‘One of the largest Hawala networks in the world unearthed’. We have never seen the Guiness Book of Records entry for Hawaladars but as always the summary of the Hawala network emphasizes how vast they can be and how much funds can be funneled across the world without detection.
This week [...]

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 Nostra [...]

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 [...]

Late December 2005 the Northern Bank in Belfast (Ireland) was robbed. Modus Operandi: Tiger Kidnap (see earlier posts). The criminals, some dressed as police officers, entered houses of bank employees and held their families at gunpoint, demanding that the employees assist them in the crime. The bank employees worked in cash centers of the bank and [...]