Illicit Finance

The Thai military said it has recovered extensive evidence of transnational online fraud from a Cambodian “scam compound” seized during border clashes last year, including target lists, scam scripts, and equipment used to disguise operations, Reuters said. 

An Abu Dhabi royal secretly backed a $500-million deal to buy nearly half of a Trump-linked cryptocurrency venture months before the United Arab Emirates secured expanded access to tightly controlled U.S. artificial-intelligence chips, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

The U.S. Justice Department’s latest release of documents on its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein includes the personally identifiable information of dozens of sex-trafficking victims, according to new analysis by The Wall Street Journal. 

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 recent guilty plea by a former TD Bank teller who helped move millions in suspicious funds through the U.S. banking system is an illustration of how easily things can go wrong when frontline staff face few internal anti-money laundering (AML) controls, according to a new report by the American Banker. 

The Trump administration has granted confidential licenses to two of the world’s largest oil traders, Vitol and Trafigura, to broker sales of Venezuelan crude, despite both firms’ recent brushes with bribery prosecutions tied to oil deals elsewhere, The Washington Post reported.

Secret audio recorded in Madrid in 2017 captures “shadow bankers” laying out a plan to launder millions of dollars tied to corruption at Venezuela’s state oil company, including a proposed bond swap designed to evade anti-money laundering controls

German authorities raided Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt and a separate office in Berlin as part of a money-laundering investigation linked to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.

Chinese-language money laundering networks have become a central conduit for illicit cryptocurrency activity, processing an estimated 20% of known on-chain laundering over the past five years and accelerating far faster than illicit financial flows tied to centralized exchanges.

When the digital avatar “Diella” was launched by the Albanian government last year, its purpose was clear: to serve as an incorruptible public servant in a country known for widespread corruption, according to new reporting by The New York Times.