Emerging Threat

OFAC designated 35 entities and individuals it said help run Iran’s shadow-banking system, focusing on private companies known as “rahbars” that move money for sanctioned Iranian banks through foreign shell companies and front-company accounts.

A deepening military and economic partnership between North Korea and Russia is systematically undermining the international sanctions architecture built over decades to constrain Pyongyang, while fueling a conventional arms buildup that raises the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula.

China’s two-decade effort to build an international financial system anchored by its currency, the renminbi, is gaining traction as wars and Western sanctions push U.S. adversaries to seek alternatives to the dollar.

The Trump administration has cut more than 4,000 employees from some of the nation’s top law-enforcement agencies even as it has pledged to get tough on crime, according to U.S. Justice Department records.

Canada’s financial intelligence agency has issued a bulletin warning banks and other institutions to be on alert for money laundering linked to an escalating extortion campaign targeting South Asian diaspora communities, particularly in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario.

China has rolled out tough new rules aimed at countering foreign sanctions, explicitly linking the measures to U.S. threats of secondary sanctions on Chinese banks over Iranian oil purchases and warning that further retaliation tools are likely to follow.

Brazil’s First Capital Command, or PCC, has expanded from a prison gang founded in Sao Paulo state in 1993 into what authorities describe as the largest criminal group in the Americas, with some 40,000 members and affiliates operating in nearly 30 countries.

Cybercrime syndicates operating in Cambodia have grown so large and politically connected that the industry now rivals the country’s formal economy, with online scam networks accused of corrupting officials, enslaving workers, and defrauding victims around the world.

South American governments are deploying soldiers, drones, sniffer dogs, artificial intelligence, and expanded port surveillance to try to stem a record flow of cocaine, but the crackdown is having little impact as traffickers change up routes and tactics.

Anthropic withheld its new artificial intelligence model, Mythos, from a broad public release after internal testing showed it could autonomously find and exploit serious software flaws, alarming company researchers and prompting banks and government agencies to move quickly to assess the threat.