Money Laundering

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said new federal guidance on Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) is intended to ease banks’ “pain points” and shift U.S. anti-money laundering oversight toward measurable effectiveness.

Spanish authorities have seized property linked to Nikolai Kolesov, the chief executive of state-owned Russian Helicopters, on suspicion of money laundering, according to an anti-corruption group founded by the late Alexei Navalny. 

Pope Leo XIV has approved new rules that redistribute control over the Holy See’s financial investments, diluting the exclusive authority the Vatican Bank has held since 2022 and formalizing a shared model of oversight across church institutions.

A British national pleaded guilty on Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court for his role in a fraud scheme that took nearly $100 million from victims who funded loans to fake wine collectors, Reuters said. 

The son of a Chinese-born Uyghur oligarch who allegedly ran a massive smuggling and money-laundering ring has purchased a former church in North London for more than $3 million and converted it into a mosque and cultural center, OCCRP reported. 

Police in southern Brazil have arrested four people accused of running a nationwide Instagram ad scam that used AI-generated videos and images of supermodel Gisele Bündchen and other celebrities, Reuters reported. 

Illegal gold mining has grown into one of the Western Hemisphere’s largest and fastest‑expanding illicit economies, out‑earning narcotics in parts of Colombia and Peru and pushing conflict‑linked gold toward U.S. ports and banks. 

The U.S. Justice Department will shut down its flagship anti-cartel task force as part of the most far-reaching DOJ shakeup in two decades, according to internal documents reviewed by Reuters.

Jeffrey Epstein remained embedded in Wall Street’s elite financial networks in the years before his 2019 death, maintaining accounts at more than 20 banks and executing large transactions with prominent investment firms, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal. 

North Korea’s government-backed IT workers are quietly infiltrating global tech firms and contractor platforms, earning steady crypto salaries that are laundered through a sprawling network of intermediaries to fund the regime’s weapons programs, according to new analysis from Chainalysis.