Financial Crime News

The situation in Afghanistan is appalling. Exactly how appalling, we cannot know unless we are present. As journalists fly in, report from the tarmac or, in one case, from just outside the airport gates as bullets flew, we get a multitude of one-dimensional pictures that create a collage but not a cohesive whole. Stories of abuse are rife but on the other hand so are stories that the Taliban is far from the version of 20 years ago. All we can say is that the situation is extraordinarily complex, dangerous and it's likely to become far, far worse.

In the middle of all of this, a mail arrives. It's headed "Urgent request from Mohammed."

This is a far from infrequent occurrence. In fact, it happens so often that it falls into that hole where due diligence and newsworthiness do not collide. So as a news outlet, we pay less attention to it than we would if we were a provider of due diligence information. Here's a round-up of recent announcements from the HKMA.

Sometimes the headlines just write themselves.

Like this one.

Mary Margaret Kreuper, 79, of Los Angeles, was charged yesterday with one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering. In a plea agreement Kreuper has pleaded guilty to the two charges that carry a maximum statutory penalty of 40 years in federal prison.

I am so blessed. This chap has purloined money from a cryptocurrency account and wants to send it to me. So he chose an address at antimoneylaundering.net.

If you were to receive mail from a government URL, you'd give it the time of day. Everyone would.

But this fake investment scam uses an address owned by the government of Paraguay as its spoofed "from" address. And, of course, it uses a free any anonymous e-mail address to collect responses from its victims.

And behind the spam-scam is a far more sophisticated scheme. We scrape away the stinky stuff and lay bare the fraudulent scheme.

How often do you read something and find out that it's not what you thought it was when you started?

For all those that leapt on "Melbourne" - it's almost certainly not the one you were thinking of.

Melbourne, Florida is where this story is developing.

If you want to be ripped off, e-mail the following:

*NAME: MR MARTIN COOK
EMAIL: **martincoookuk@gmail.com*
or martincoookuk@sim.it

Marc Antrim, 43, of South El Monte, and others walked into a marijuana warehouse in Los Angeles and walked out with half a ton of weed and USD600,000 in cash. Then they distributed the drugs. Antrim was a police officer and one of his co-accused was an employee of the warehouse.

There's an actor called Zachary Joseph Horwitz. He's also known as Zach Avery. He lives in a place called Berverlywood. Honestly. It's not Beverly (sic) Hills and it's not Hollywood. Actors, at least the good ones, are skilled at creating an illusion. What you see is not supposed to be real.

So what happens when an actor takes those skills away from the stage? The answer is... he gets arrested for fraud. And then the Federal Bureau of Investigation gets excited and issues a media release worthy of a hyperbolic - and grammatically dubious - studio. But under that, there's actually a good story.

The USA's Securities and Exchange Commission has obtained an asset freeze and other emergency relief in an emergency civil (i.e. not criminal court) enforcement action against Los Angeles-based actor Zachary Horwitz and his company, 1inMM (one in a million) Capital, LLC in connection with an alleged Ponzi scheme that raised over USD690 million. Horwitz and 1inMM allegedly told investors that they were buying film rights, purportedly to resell them to Netflix and HBO; in fact, 1inMM actually had no business relationship with either company.

Any vaccine being advertised on websites or the dark web, will not be legitimate, will not have been tested and may be dangerous. - Interpol.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that vaccines would be the next vehicle, after personal protective equipment, for fraudsters capitalising on the world's anxiety to find a fix for CoVid-19.

After all, labels and vials aren't exactly difficult to make or come by - and there are very, very established production and distribution networks for a wide range of illegal, and illegally trafficked, copies, entirely counterfeit and somewhere in between drugs.

What is more surprising is that for something with such an opportunity to have taken active steps to combat these risks before distribution of CoVid-19 vaccines started, it's not been...

Any vaccine being advertised on websites or the dark web, will not be legitimate, will not have been tested and may be dangerous. - Interpol.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that vaccines would be the next vehicle, after personal protective equipment, for fraudsters capitalising on the world's anxiety to find a fix for CoVid-19.

After all, labels and vials aren't exactly difficult to make or come by - and there are very, very established production and distribution networks for a wide range of illegal, and illegally trafficked, copies, entirely counterfeit and somewhere in between drugs.

What is more surprising is that for something with such an opportunity to have taken active steps to combat these risks before distribution of CoVid-19 vaccines started, it's not been...

It's been months since we last had a threat of this type. But where there is one cockroach, there are usually many so we might expect that another wave of such spam-scams is happening.

Bitcoin wallet: 1L6XxPRuLJdr6JCqw8dwNUm1wFLisrGREL

In 2015, I wrote "Cleaning up the 'Net." It was an action plan to reduce incidence of financial and other crime committed over the internet. One of the main principles of the book is that those that provide services to internet users - including domain name registrars and others - were enabling and profiting from crime.

Is 2021 the year when someone listens and starts to take seriously the ease with which criminals can, for example, register domain names that even the most basic know-your-customer would establish is more likely than not to be used for some improper purpose?

On the weekend when, at last, the USA gets laws to require at least some degree of declaration of the ownership of companies, is there an appetite to tackle this even bigger problem?

Hint: it's not...

We haven't seen this one for a while, or rather we've not seen it in this format.

The simplest and oldest 419 scam is back in time for Christmas.

And once more, Google is complicit. Look at the "reply to" address. How is not possible that they are not required to identify and block things such as this? Oh, yes. They say "we are google. We are big. You can bog off."