Money Laundering

Facebook has become the dominant online platform for illegal wildlife trade, accounting for nearly 75 percent of the trafficking advertisements detected across 61 websites and apps over almost two years, according to a new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 

A Mexican national pleaded guilty to participating in a two-year, multimillion-dollar black-market peso exchange conspiracy that laundered drug trafficking proceeds through Texas to Mexico, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday. 

A sprawling scam compound on Cambodia’s border with Thailand housed an estimated 10,000 workers and included offices, dormitories, villas, and restaurants, underscoring the industrial scale of Southeast Asia’s cyberfraud industry.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday proposed new anti-money-laundering and sanctions-compliance rules for permitted payment stablecoin issuers, marking a major step in implementing the 2025 GENIUS Act and expanding federal oversight of the sector.

The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) on Tuesday proposed a broad rewrite of anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism-financing rules that would shift the focus of compliance from technical box-checking to whether a financial institution’s controls are actually effective. 

Jeffrey Epstein received $25 million in late 2015 for consulting work tied to a U.S. Justice Department tax-evasion settlement with Swiss private bank Edmond de Rothschild Group.

A Russian cryptocurrency payments network founded by sanctioned actors is expanding into Africa as Moscow seeks new channels to move money around western restrictions imposed after the invasion of Ukraine.

Several senior Binance compliance officials overseeing sanctions, investigations, and financial-crime monitoring have left the company in recent months as the crypto exchange faces renewed scrutiny over alleged sanctions evasion and illicit-finance risks.

A politically connected blockchain project that partnered with the Trump family’s crypto firm promoted a proposed resort in Timor-Leste involving three people later sanctioned by the United States for ties to the Prince Group, an alleged Southeast Asian scam syndicate.

Cambodia’s parliament on Friday passed the country’s first law specifically aimed at combating online scam centers, setting prison terms and fines for fraud, money laundering, data theft, and recruitment tied to the illicit industry as scrutiny intensifies over the country’s role in global cyber scams.