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 an ideal world for compliance officers, the finances of individuals plotting mass casualty attacks would exhibit enough anomalies to draw attention to their plans before they could carry them out, assuming such plans were made at all.
Among the many challenges of identifying terrorist funds is the fact that they can be hidden in plain sight, according to Colin P. Clarke, an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation who studies the subject.
EU finance ministers broadly endorsed a French plan to tackle terrorist financing ahead of the expected issuance in the coming weeks of related regulatory proposals by the European Commission.
Dozens of small banks and credit unions have begun courting money services businesses over the past year, offering financial services to the high-risk clients in exchange for compliance-related fees.
When Robert Frimet arrived last summer at a small check cashing business in California to audit its compliance with financial crime and sanctions rules, one problem immediately stood out: the business had never heard of the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Gauging the vulnerability of money service businesses' agents to being used to launder money or finance terrorism is central to adopting a risk-based approach to compliance, according to a global watchdog report released Monday.
The Obama administration said Monday that it would lift restrictions on how much money Cuban Americans can send to Cuba, easing financial constraints first established in the 1960s.