News

French "neo-banks"—purely online banks that operate independently—helped unearth a new fraud scheme in 2020, while real estate and other non-financial companies largely failed to clamp down on illicit funds, France's financial intelligence unit disclosed in an annual report. As elsewhere in Europe, COVID-19 substantially shifted the focus of suspicious transaction reports in France towards fraud last year, and STR volumes climbed 17 percent from 2019 to exceed 111,000. Mainstream banks were again responsible for more than half of the total, followed by payment services providers with 31,271 STRs and insurance firms with 4,564. One group stole and routed €1.8 million...