Illicit Finance

The United Kingdom announced a new package of sanctions Tuesday targeting cryptocurrency exchanges and a Kremlin-backed shadow finance network known as A7 as part of an effort to close off payment routes used by Russia to sustain its war against Ukraine. 

Company directors connected to Cambodia’s Prince Group, which the United States has designated a transnational criminal organization, have acquired millions of dollars in luxury Tokyo real estate.

Local governments in southern Italy that colluded with organized crime deliberately avoided large EU-funded projects to stay below anti-mafia certification thresholds, according to new academic research.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have jointly concluded that deliberate de-risking campaigns by traditional Baltic banks have driven large-scale client migration toward Lithuanian fintech firms, concentrating money laundering risk in a single digital institution.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing federal financial regulators to treat undocumented immigrants as potential credit and compliance risks.

A former Austrian intelligence official was convicted Wednesday of spying for Russia in the largest espionage trial in Austria’s postwar history, delivering a verdict that officials hope will help repair the country’s standing as a hub of hostile foreign intelligence activity.

The surging value of Pokémon trading cards has attracted organized-crime groups seeking to launder illicit funds through the largely unregulated collectables market.

Russian intelligence-linked hackers who penetrated the U.S. Treasury Department in the 2020 SolarWinds cyberattack gained the ability to access email accounts across the entire agency, including staff working on sanctions and financial-crime investigations.

Bitcoin Depot, formerly the largest operator of cryptocurrency ATMs in the United States, filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday and took its roughly 9,700 kiosks offline.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating a surge of more than $800 million in oil futures trades that occurred moments before President Trump announced on social media that he was postponing strikes on Tehran’s energy infrastructure.