News

A regional bank in New York's failure to notice and address a third-party prepaid-card provider's weaknesses against illicit finance allowed fraudsters to steal $300 million in COVID-19 aid and direct-deposit payroll in only six months, state and federal regulators have alleged. Senior compliance personnel at Metropolitan Commercial Bank, or MCB, knew of MovoCash's susceptibility to identity theft-related fraud and money laundering in January 2020, after learning of a rise in "unusual" wire transfers out of prepaid accounts that the lender serviced, New York's Department of Financial Services, or DFS, concluded in a consent order Thursday, Oct. 19. MCB approached MovoCash...