MSBs

China has launched the biggest overhaul of its cross-border tax and capital-controls regime in decades, threatening three popular offshore brokers with at least $330 million in penalties, vowing stricter bank oversight, and ramping up private pressure on the country’s wealthiest citizens.

Financial firms have improved their sanctions controls but persistent weaknesses in due diligence, screening, and asset-freezing controls continue to drive compliance violations, the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said in a multi-firm review published Thursday.

Bitcoin Depot, formerly the largest operator of cryptocurrency ATMs in the United States, filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday and took its roughly 9,700 kiosks offline.

The head of Canada’s anti-money-laundering (AML) watchdog is stepping down as Ottawa overhauls its approach to fighting financial crime and braces for the results of an international audit of its controls.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday issued an alert urging financial institutions to step up their detection of money laundering, sanctions evasion, and digital-asset transfers tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The U.S. Treasury Department said on Friday it had imposed sanctions on an international network of 16 people and companies that allegedly diverted more than $100 million to Hezbollah since 2020. 

Digital money transfers have overtaken cash for the first time in the U.S.-to-Mexico remittance corridor, marking a shift in the world’s largest flow of cross-border family payments and intensifying pressure on traditional cash-based providers.

FinCEN said Tuesday it has expanded a geographic targeting order (GTO) along the Southwest border, extending the measure into New Mexico for the first time and adding Maricopa and Pima counties in Arizona.

The Justice Department released its first department-wide corporate enforcement policy for criminal matters, establishing a uniform framework for how prosecutors handle corporate cases across the department, except antitrust matters. 

The DEA opened a secret investigation into Jeffrey Epstein in 2015 on suspicions of money laundering, drug trafficking, and running a prostitution ring that procured Eastern European women for high-profile clients.