Oversight Agency

The U.S. government is threatening to downgrade Fiji to the lowest tier in its global human trafficking rankings unless authorities take “decisive action” against a religious group linked to human trafficking and transnational organized crime, OCCRP reported. 

PayPal has applied to form a bank that would offer business loans and interest-bearing savings accounts, a move that would deepen the payments company’s push into core banking services, The Wall Street Journal reported.

A Russian “shadow fleet” tanker sanctioned by the UK, EU and U.S. continued transporting oil in late 2025, underscoring what an investigation by Follow the Money describes as the limited impact Western measures have had on the cash flow Moscow earns from crude exports.

The Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI) division identified $10.6 billion in tax and other financial crimes in the federal fiscal year ending September 30, a rise of nearly 16% from the prior year. 

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.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has conditionally approved five national trust bank charters for firms focused on digital assets, in a move that brings more crypto-related activity into the federal banking system but under supervisory constraints.

The Trump administration is moving to give the U.S. Treasury Department’s financial intelligence unit a decisive say over how banks are punished for anti–money-laundering (AML) failures, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal. 

Nine of the largest U.S. lenders made “inappropriate distinctions” among customers in politically sensitive sectors, including by applying enhanced risk controls in response to negative media reports, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said. 

The United States has imposed sanctions on four individuals and four companies it says helped recruit, pay and deploy Colombian mercenaries to fight for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The UK government is taking aim at corrupt bankers, lawyers, and accountants and deploying new tech tools to identify dirty money as part of a new strategy to root out tens of billions in illicit funds entering the country each year.