Covered Institutions

A loose ecosystem of young cybercriminals known as “the Com” is increasingly being linked to a widening range of online and real-world offenses, from ransomware-style corporate attacks to the hacking of Pornhub users’ data, according to The Guardian.

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an order directing the federal government to loosen marijuana regulations and accelerate a long-stalled effort to reclassify the drug, a step that could mark one of the biggest federal shifts on cannabis policy in decades, Reuters reported.

Australian regulators took coordinated action on Thursday to address weaknesses in the anti-money laundering and risk-management controls of Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, including the imposition of a A$50 million operational-risk capital charge. 

The U.S. regulator of national banks scaled back some of the compliance obligations it had imposed on Citigroup under a 2020 enforcement action that penalized the lender for inadequate risk controls and data-management practices, the Financial Times reported.

The EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) on Thursday published draft technical standards intended to unify how financial supervisors assess risks and how the supervisory body will select the “most complex” high-risk institutions and groups it will directly oversee. 

U.S. lawmakers have voted to repeal the 2019 Caesar Civilian Protection Act, ending a far-reaching sanctions regime that broadly targeted any entity providing goods or services to Syria’s government, the Financial Times reported.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday vowed to designate Venezuela’s government a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO) and ordered a “total and complete” blockade of sanctioned oil tankers moving into and out of the country.

The UK government will examine the role of cryptocurrency donations in politics as part of a wider review of party-financing rules triggered by a bribery case involving a Reform UK politician, Bloomberg reported.

Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman and other oligarchs are exploiting European investment treaties to sue Ukraine for hundreds of millions, and in some cases billions, of dollars, according to a new investigation by Follow the Money.

PayPal has applied to form a bank that would offer business loans and interest-bearing savings accounts, a move that would deepen the payments company’s push into core banking services, The Wall Street Journal reported.