Organized Crime

Mexico’s sweeping crackdown on electronic cigarettes is accelerating a shift in the country’s $1.5-billion vape-pen market toward organized crime, according to ABC News.

A former TD Bank employee pleaded guilty to conspiring to launder monetary instruments after prosecutors said he used his position to help a money-laundering network move hundreds of millions of dollars through the institution. 

Google is suing an alleged Chinese-speaking cybercriminal group it says helped drive a sprawling phishing operation that targeted Americans with fraudulent text messages impersonating government agencies and major companies, NBC News reported.

The United States is tightening its oversight of the tens of billions of dollars resident and undocumented migrants send home each year through Western Union, MoneyGram, and other money services businesses (MSBs), according to a recent U.S. Treasury Department warning.  

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.

Fugitive former Wirecard executive Jan Marsalek has been linked to a sprawling, multibillion-dollar money laundering network that British investigators say connects street-level drug dealers in the UK to sanctioned Russian oligarchs and the Kremlin’s security services, the Financial Times reported.

A group of former Chinese American employees has filed a class-action lawsuit against Toronto-Dominion Bank in the United States, alleging they were unjustly fired after being linked to a major money laundering scandal involving Chinese money brokers and Mexican drug cartels, the Financial Post reported. 

The United States, Britain and Australia have imposed coordinated sanctions on Russian technology companies and individuals accused of providing key online infrastructure for ransomware and other cyberattacks, Reuters reported. 

Albanian organized crime groups have tightened their grip at home and expanded across Europe while drawing minimal pushback from Brussels, according to a Follow the Money investigation conducted with media partner BLAST. 

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.