Financial Crime Weekly Episode 268

Welcome to episode 268 of the Financial Crime Weekly Podcast. I am Chris Kirkbride. In this episode, the United Nations Security Council has blacklisted two entities and six armed group commanders operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while the US Treasury designated over 50 targets and shipping vessels linked to the multi-jurisdictional oil network of Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani. Money laundering enforcement saw the US Department of Justice prosecute a $43 million Chinese "pig butchering" scam network and sentence two former TD Bank insiders for taking bribes to open fraudulent accounts, as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) released a report warning of sophisticated criminal exploitation of virtual assets, decentralised finance (DeFi), and proprietary stablecoins. In fraud developments, US federal courts sentenced individuals across three unrelated government contracting, scrap metal, and COVID-19 tax credit schemes, while the UK's National Crime Agency secured convictions in a pandemic nitrile glove procurement fraud and collaborated with Nigerian authorities to arrest six celebrity-impersonating scammers. Finally, United Nations agencies are supporting anti-corruption programmes in Haiti and Kyrgyzstan through school integrity clubs and digital public sector solutions, as global authorities deploy coordinated indictments and prison terms, including cyberattack sentences for members of the "Scattered Spider" collective, to disrupt resilient cybercrime infrastructure and state-backed networks.

A transcript of this podcast, with links to the stories, will be available at www.crimes.financial.

The photograph on the podcast cover art is by Sora Shimazaki at Pexels, and the stinger sample between each news section is ‘Ben Logo 1’ by BenKirb from Pixabay.