Financial Crime News

The UK's National Crime Agency is on a roll. It's taken a while for the successor to so many different organisations to get its act properly together, demonstrating the constant shuffling around of people and responsibilities detracts from their ability to do the job. The men and women of the NCA are a hard-working and bright bunch and recent results show that if they are left to their own devices, and given time to execute sensible plans, they do exactly as they are supposed to do: get convictions, often where they were apparently unlikely. One, yesterday, makes the point nicely.

This follow up to the article about a crypto-asset trading fraud being promoted on LinkedIn shows the persistence of the fraudsters.

(updates as to telephone numbers and emails will be added to this article from time to time)

UPDATE 200191120: disturbing find: a paid-for advert on LinkedIn which is therefore profiting from this fraud.

We all know that getting any kind of new project off the ground is a complex, stressful and potentially ruinous venture. So, while there are those that spend their own capital, sweat equity, there are those that seek funding in the forms of loans or investment. So what happened when two New Jersey men decided to bootstrap their proposed development of a leisure complex with bunker-like, "doomsday", apartments designed to withstand every thing from biological threats to a nuclear winter?

This might just be the e-mail that launches a million problems, or more. It is incredibly simple and extremely sneaky. And it passes some anti-spam filters.

There's more than USD2,000 million in moneys clawed back from fraudulent deals.

Oh, wait. It's a spam-scam. And it wants you to send your identification documents "via" a telephone number. Genius.

It all looks so viable: Henry Golding, the star of the fantastically successful film "Crazy Rich Asians", in an interview with the very credible Singapore newspaper The Straits Times, says he's making shed loads of money in an automated trading scheme endorsed by, amongst others, Bill Gates. And it's floated around LinkedIn for a while. We took a look.

Following an earlier statement (here) Malindo Air has given more details of how its data breach came about.

Australia is cancelling the debts of students of a large failed education provider that once had government backing. It's also obtained massive penalty and restitution orders. But there is a fly in the ointment.

We get the best of the best when it comes to examples of rubbish spam-scams. This just made our day.

Malindo Air has issued the following statement providing updated information relating to a data breach in its booking system.

Fraud committed against Chinese in Australia has been a problem for a while as criminals use a variety of tactics. It is known, for example, that young foreign Mandarin speakers are recruited abroad to visit Australia for short periods, affecting tourism status, where they follow a script to commit fraud or extortion in a way similar to the boiler-room scams often run by Europeans in South East Asia. This year is is already far worse than the whole of last year.

UK's HMRC secure conviction against PPI claims lead generator

David Buckley, 51, a company director of Basingstoke in England instructed Mahmood Sadiq Poptani, 60, an accountant of Swansea in Wales and together they diverted money collected on behalf of HM Revenue and Customs in respect of income tax and National Insurance deductions from the salaries of staff and value added tax. They are now in jail.

There are some aspects of policing that are made more difficult than they should be by a range of factors. One of those factors is attitudes, on both sides, when a crime is committed by members of a "community" against others in that "community."

Intra-community crime is always difficult to investigate because the investigation is, almost always, conducted by someone from outside that "community." The reasons for this are many and varied. Without entering into the choppy waters of arguing that there should be no "communities," only "society," Nigel Morris-Cotterill examines why FCROs are in a difficult position when "communities" and offences within them are considered.

At the Financial Crime Forum's 2006 forum in Hong Kong, one session dealt with the trade in endangered species. With the very recent and belated acknowledgement by international bodies that such conduct is, in fact, a financial crime, there is a welcome focus on the profits from such trade rather than solely on the animals and their products. In the USA last week, a bizarre offence came to court but this time, the defendant says, it was nothing to do with profit.

Londoners, pay attention: slag isn't what you think it is. For those from mining communities, slag is what's left over after coal, etc. has been washed. It's poured into conical mountains and left lying around, in theory to dry but occasionally the slurry undermines it and it slides down whatever gradient it is sitting on, sometimes with terrible results, as in the Welsh mining village of Aberfan in 1966. What might be in those "ancient slag" heaps in addition to wet dust? A 77 year old Californian claimed to know and to have a method of extracting the good stuff.