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Money Mule Networks Enlisting Ukrainian Refugees in Germany

By Gabriel Vedrenne

Criminals exploited an EU-wide relaxation of onboarding procedures in the opening months of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year to open new bank accounts, move assets across borders and exchange them for cryptocurrency, German officials have revealed. In an annual report, the German financial intelligence unit, or FIU, disclosed Friday that the suspects behind such schemes sought to recruit money mules from among the more than 1.1 million Ukrainians who found refuge in Germany, and thus avail themselves of the simplified customer-identification-program requirements that banks in the country offered them. "They were targeted via social media channels in their...

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