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Western Union Settles Federal AML and Wire Fraud Charges
By Valentina Pasquali and Daniel Bethencourt
printCORRECTION APPENDED: The world's largest remitter has agreed to pay $586 million for transferring hundreds of millions of dollars over a period of several years for human smugglers, drug traffickers and fraudsters in the United States and abroad, U.S. officials said Thursday. In a deferred prosecution agreement, or DPA, and a jointly issued civil monetary penalty, Colorado-based Western Union admitted to having willfully violated federal anti-money laundering laws and regulations from 2004 to 2012 and failing to appropriately monitor its network of 550,000 independent agents operating from retail outlets in 200 countries. According to the DPA, which resolves allegations by...
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