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How the Ashton Whiteley Scam grew and impacted the victims

01 February 2021
Knowledge Base

by Dina-Perla Portnaar

The Ashton Whiteley Scam illustrates how financial crime really works. Not a lot of personal cases were shared with the public before in order to make financial crime tangible. Here is an outline of the events given by one of the many victims of the Ashton Whiteley Scam that took place a couple of years ago. The man shared his story with me, which we will share in a couple of articles. Here is part two. Continue reading…

Key learnings from the virtual AML & FinCrime Tech Forum

30 January 2021
Knowledge Base

Mirela Ciobanu & Dina-Perla Portnaar

Almost everyone agrees that 2020 has been a rough year. However, 2021 has not smoothed some of its roughness. Most of us continue working from home, having to balance family life with professional activities, dealing with a high degree of anxiety due to uncertainty of what is going to happen next. However, being able to take part in virtual events has helped us to stray in touch with our peers, to maintain a high level of engagement with our industries and to learn more about the topics that we are interested in – in this case how to fight financial crime and find the right business partner to assist your deal with financial crime from a compliance perspective.
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How the Ashton Whiteley Scam began

21 January 2021
Knowledge Base

by Dina-Perla Portnaar

The Ashton Whiteley Scam illustrates how financial crime really works. Not a lot of personal cases were shared with the public before in order to make financial crime tangible. Here is an outline of the events given by one of the many victims of the Ashton Whiteley Scam that took place a couple of years ago. The man shared his story with me, which we will share in a couple of articles. Here is part one. Continue reading…

Ashton Whiteley Scam illustrates financial crime

12 January 2021
Knowledge Base

by Dina-Perla Portnaar

The Ashton Whiteley Scam illustrates how financial crime really works. Not a lot of personal cases were shared with the public before in order to make financial crime tangible. Here is an outline of events of a victim of the Ahston Whiteley Scam a couple of years ago. On the 10th of July 2017, a man was approached by a lady who called herself Julia Wright. She came across as a professional; introducing the company she works for as a well-known, reputable and solid firm, operating in the financial world with customers from all over the world. Because of expansion ideas in Europe, the company approached a selected number of potential investors for their future plans.  Continue reading…

The Hague Court of Appeal wants the Public Prosecution Service to prosecute Ralph Hamers, former CEO of ING Bank

16 December 2020
Knowledge Base

In 2018, due to a failing anti-money laundering policy, ING Bank reached a settlement of 775 million euros with the Public Prosecution Service. Ralph Hamers remained out of harm’s way. Pieter Lakeman, chairman of Stichting Onderzoek Bedrijfs Informatie (SOBI) asked the Court of Appeal to compel the Public Prosecution Service to prosecute Ralph Hamers, who has been CEO of the Swiss bank UBS since September. The Court considers it important “that the standard is confirmed in public criminal proceedings and that bank directors cannot go unpunished if prohibited conduct actually took place during their leadership. Citizens must be able to see that such actions are also not accepted by the government.” According to Pieter Lakeman and his counsel Gabriel Meijers, witness hearings conducted by the IRS about ING Bank showcase that massive and extremely damaging cuts in the anti-money laundering department have been made since Ralph Hamers became CEO of the bank in 2014. Ralph Hamers ignored warnings from his Chief Risk Officer – among others – paving the way for the influx of lucrative yet criminal customers.  Continue reading…

Defrauding Europe and the West? How Hong Kong banks facilitate the defrauding of thousands of unsuspecting Europeans

04 December 2020
Knowledge Base

by Elfriede Sixt

Recently, the European Funds Recovery Initiative (EFRI) was joined by a group of more than 30 European1 people who fell victim to highly sophisticated and devious “boiler room” scams, which are currently coming from China and especially from its financial center, Hong Kong. The scammers routinely abuse the reputation of this Asian financial metropolis. By doing some research on this kind of scams, we have come to learn that with being a wonderful gateway between mainland China and the rest of the world and with being a known prospering investment place for Chinese technology companies, Hong Kong has clearly set the perfect grounds for immense fraud activities at the expense of unsuspecting Europeans for many years now. Evidently, hundreds, if not thousands, of Europeans have been transferring millions, if not billions, of their life-time savings to Hong Kong banks, trusted so it seemed in a safe and developed banking environment. Media reports about this kind of fraud occurring in Hong Kong date back to 20151.

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ESMA published the results of its Peer Review related to Wirecard

05 November 2020
Knowledge Base

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s securities markets regulator, has published the results of its Fast Track Peer Review (Peer Review) which assessed the events leading to the collapse of Wirecard AG and the supervisory response by BaFin (Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungaufsicht) and the Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel (FREP). The Peer Review focuses on the application by BaFin and FREP of the Guidelines on Enforcement of Financial Information (GLEFI) and on impediments to the effectiveness of the German two-tier supervisory system for financial reporting in the specific context of the Wirecard case. The Peer Review, based on the assessment, identifies a number of deficiencies, inefficiencies and legal and procedural impediments. These relate to the following areas: the independence of BaFin from issuers and government; market monitoring by both BaFin and FREP; examination procedures of FREP; and the effectiveness of the supervisory system in the area of financial reporting. The Peer Review provides recommendations to address these shortcomings.  Continue reading…

And what did the authorities do?

19 October 2020
Knowledge Base

by Geert Vermeulen

The FinCEN files have caused quite some commotion recently. A large amount of secret information about suspicious transactions has been revealed and we are still working our way through the information. Most of the newspaper articles commenting on the FinCEN files focus on what went wrong at the banks. And as with many of these X-leaks, Y-papers and Z-files, the revelations will likely lead to a number of prosecutions, more legislation and stricter supervision. But what do we see when we take a step back and look at it from a distance? Above all, we see a lot of suspicious transactions. That was to be expected, of course, because that was the reason why these transactions were reported to FinCEN in the first place. You could also say that the system is working! And perhaps the banks on the other side of the transaction reported them as well? We don’t know. Continue reading…

FCA bans the sale of crypto-derivatives to retail consumers

12 October 2020
Knowledge Base

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published final rules banning the sale of derivatives and exchange traded notes (ETNs) that reference certain types of cryptoassests to retail consumers. The FCA considers these products to be ill-suited for retail consumers due to the harm they pose. These products cannot be reliably valued by retail consumers because of the: 

inherent nature of the underlying assets, which means they have no reliable basis for valuation prevalence of market abuse and financial crime in the secondary market (eg cyber theft) extreme volatility in cryptoasset price movements inadequate understanding of cryptoassets by retail consumers lack of legitimate investment need for retail consumers to invest in these products  

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