Fraud

An elite unit of Portugal’s Public Prosecutor’s Office has taken over a money-laundering investigation involving Elvira Gavrilova Paterson, a Ukrainian movie producer who helped promote alleged crypto frauds linked to Russian entrepreneur Vladimir Okhotnikov, according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. 

Japan’s rapidly aging population is creating a sprawling new target for financial abuse, with older people experiencing cognitive decline controlling assets worth almost half the country’s GDP.

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has marked a stark shift in white-collar crime enforcement, with federal prosecutors and investigators stepping back from complex foreign-bribery, money-laundering, and corruption cases, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

The social-media giant Meta has tolerated widespread advertising fraud tied to Chinese customers in order to protect billions of dollars in revenue, even after internal teams repeatedly flagged the activity as problematic, Reuters reported. 

Nationwide Building Society has been hit with a £44-million fine by the UK’s financial regulator over longstanding weaknesses in its systems to detect and prevent financial crime, including failures that allowed tens of millions of pounds in fraudulent Covid furlough payments to pass through a customer’s account.

Mexico’s anti-money laundering unit has frozen the bank accounts of Raúl Rocha Cantú, the Mexican co-owner of the Miss Universe Organization, as authorities investigate alleged links to drug, fuel and arms trafficking, the Associated Press reported.

Switzerland’s attorney general has filed criminal charges against UBS and a former Credit Suisse compliance officer, alleging failures to prevent money laundering linked to the long-running Mozambique “tuna bonds” scandal, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Trafigura Group’s own trade-finance staff raised red flags about its nickel deals with businessman Prateek Gupta more than two years before the trading house revealed it was facing millions of dollars in losses.

French investigators have stepped up their probe into alleged corruption at Patrick Drahi’s Altice telecoms group with a series of coordinated raids across the country, seizing cash, luxury goods and other assets, Bloomberg reported.

Singapore is facing renewed scrutiny over its defenses against dirty money after police seized hundreds of millions of dollars in assets linked to the Prince Group, a conglomerate labelled by U.S. and UK authorities as a “transnational criminal empire,” according to the Financial Times.