Crypto

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said new federal guidance on Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) is intended to ease banks’ “pain points” and shift U.S. anti-money laundering oversight toward measurable effectiveness.

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.

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. 

A woman accused of running a multibillion-pound investment fraud in China has pleaded guilty in London to laundering bitcoin linked to the scheme.

Canada’s anti–money laundering watchdog has levied a C$19.5 million penalty against crypto exchange KuCoin for violations of the country’s AML rules.

OFAC sanctioned two Iranian financial facilitators and more than a dozen individuals and entities based in Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates for moving funds that allegedly benefited Iran’s military. 

France has warned it may challenge the right of some crypto companies licensed elsewhere in the European Union to operate domestically, stepping up pressure for stricter oversight of the industry.