Lenders

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal from Halkbank, leaving the lender to face criminal charges over allegations that it helped Iran evade sanctions and launder billions of dollars through the American financial system.

Police in southern Brazil have arrested four people accused of running a nationwide Instagram ad scam that used AI-generated videos and images of supermodel Gisele Bündchen and other celebrities, Reuters reported. 

China has quietly built a financial workaround allowing it to keep paying for Iranian oil despite sweeping U.S. sanctions, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

Illegal gold mining has grown into one of the Western Hemisphere’s largest and fastest‑expanding illicit economies, out‑earning narcotics in parts of Colombia and Peru and pushing conflict‑linked gold toward U.S. ports and banks. 

Jeffrey Epstein remained embedded in Wall Street’s elite financial networks in the years before his 2019 death, maintaining accounts at more than 20 banks and executing large transactions with prominent investment firms, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal. 

A previously undisclosed report by the Inspector General for the U.S. State Department and officials interviewed by ProPublica allege that former Ambassador to El Salvador Ronald D. Johnson protected Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele from American and Salvadoran law enforcement efforts. 

North Korea’s government-backed IT workers are quietly infiltrating global tech firms and contractor platforms, earning steady crypto salaries that are laundered through a sprawling network of intermediaries to fund the regime’s weapons programs, according to new analysis from Chainalysis.

French authorities are investigating a crude oil tanker suspected of operating within a “shadow fleet” moving Russian oil, after the vessel “Boracay” anchored off Saint-Nazaire, Reuters said citing the French Navy.

International payments cooperative Swift will launch a permissioned blockchain to route transactions among global banks as part of a bid to modernize cross-border payments and blunt the rise of dollar-pegged stablecoins. 

Pig-butchering schemes have scaled into a multibillion-dollar criminal industry, according to a new report by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic cited by CoinDesk.