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Today's Top Five financial crime risk and compliance stories.

Today's Top Five financial crime risk and compliance stories.

Don't miss our round-up of our top five financial crime risk and compliance (and adjacent) stories this morning.

This morning, a spam-scam arrived claiming that a subscription had been renewed.

Then a few minutes later, we came across a news article that had something in common.

Is it pure coincidence?

It's clever. It's simple. It's even got a personal identifier in it (not that that's clever - and it demonstrates that it's scam - for reasons we aren't going to explain in public)

Many people will click on this. They shouldn't.

Luke Raven, Compliance Manager with Wise, Australia, outlines the failures of the Senate Committee on Australia as a Technology and Financial Centre to come to terms with one of Australia's pet technology topics: fintechs.

The Journal of Clinical Investigation is a genuine scientific journal.

However, fraudsters have used its name to attract attention to a rogue website.

Tyrome Lewis, who organised and led a gang with the media-nickname "the Oxy-Bandits" that committed 15 armed robberies of independent “mom-and-pop” pharmacies throughout Southern California, has been sentenced to 240 months in federal prison. He was convicted earlier this year and sentenced yesterday.

The Carbolic Smoke Ball case gave carte blanch for businesses to lie so long as they didn't go too far.

But that related to the efficacy of their products.

Here's an extraordinarily blatant lie that is so common that it's a surprise that it's not stamped on as a matter of policy.

adviserangelo0@gmail.com (Advisor Angelo) writes under the subject line "VERY URGENT!!!!!!!!!"

Obviously, one has to pay careful attention to such a missive.

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."

In a criminal prosecution brought by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, ASIC, the financial regulator, two out of five criminal charges brought against an alleged fraudster were dropped because the witnesses in those cases became "unavailable." The charges related to conducting an unauthorised financial services business and to soliciting moneys which were used improperly.

Nevertheless, the accused has pleaded guilty to the remaining three charges at the door of the court before his trial commenced yesterday.

It's a long and convoluted story across years and jurisdictions as well as various enforcement agencies.

The USA is, at the best of times, very good at shouting that it's a leader in combating money laundering but it's all mouth and no trousers, most of the time.

Take, for example, the noise it has made about so-called "beneficial owners" of companies, a misuse of the term that goes back to, at least, 1980s Senate Hearings into the laundering of the proceeds of drugs trafficking and the use of shell and offshore companies. 40 years on, the USA has still done nothing about it and all the signs are that nothing is going to happen soon. ADDENDUM: Comment by Jim Richards.

Here's the irony: FinCEN doesn't need to build and maintain a database at all, especially as the law restricts access to the data it holds, so voiding any KYC benefit it may have across the world.

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.