Fraud

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.

Meta internally projected late last year that roughly 10% of its 2024 revenue, or approximately $16 billion, would come from advertising tied to scams and banned goods, according to company documents reviewed by Reuters. 

ID thieves based in California’s San Fernando Valley and Glendale have been using the Social Security Numbers of foreign scholars who left the U.S. years ago to file hundreds of bank and credit-card applications, according to a cybercrime expert who spoke with the Los Angeles Times.

Australian authorities charged a former National Australia Bank employee they allege acted as the “gatekeeper of funds” for a Sydney crime syndicate accused of defrauding “all financial institutions,” according to a Reuters report.