Illicit Finance

Thousands of seemingly legitimate UK high street shops are being used by organized-crime groups to launder illicit cash, sell illegal goods, and feed wider criminal networks, with at least £47 billion a year drained from the British economy by the schemes.

Thailand’s main international airport has become a reluctant hub in a sprawling illegal trade funneling wild animals to India, where social media “petfluencers” and exotic cafes are fueling a boom in demand for rare creatures.

Customers of the Claude artificial-intelligence chatbot are being targeted by a fraud scheme in which scammers use compromised accounts to buy hundreds of pounds’ worth of gift cards.

Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange was founded and is controlled by two brothers from the Kharrazi family, one of the Islamic Republic’s most influential clerical dynasties and now closely tied to new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

Canada is moving to create a powerful new law enforcement agency dedicated to investigating and prosecuting financial crime, a step that places Ottawa on a sharply different course from Washington, where the Trump administration has scaled back federal fraud enforcement.

Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) on Friday secured a £10 million payment from defense contractor Ultra Electronics after the company accepted responsibility for failure to prevent bribery, the agency said in a statement.

A federal jury on Friday convicted former Republican U.S. Rep. David Rivera of Florida and political consultant Esther Nuhfer of secretly working as foreign agents for Venezuela’s government in 2017 and 2018, capping a five-week trial that featured testimony from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

U.S. banks have heard little from the Trump administration about the scope of an expected executive order that would require them to collect citizenship or immigration-status data on their customers, leaving the industry warning of multibillion-dollar costs and the prospect of millions of Americans being shut out of the banking system.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) placed Austria in enhanced follow-up after finding the country’s framework for investigating and prosecuting money laundering remains weak more than a decade after similar concerns were first raised.

U.S. prosecutors charged the governor of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, the mayor of Culiacan, a sitting Mexican senator, and seven others with running a drug-trafficking conspiracy with the Sinaloa Cartel.