FinancialCrimeRiskOfficers.com

Following an earlier statement (here) Malindo Air has given more details of how its data breach came about.

Australia is cancelling the debts of students of a large failed education provider that once had government backing. It's also obtained massive penalty and restitution orders. But there is a fly in the ointment.

We get the best of the best when it comes to examples of rubbish spam-scams. This just made our day.

Malindo Air has issued the following statement providing updated information relating to a data breach in its booking system.

Fraud committed against Chinese in Australia has been a problem for a while as criminals use a variety of tactics. It is known, for example, that young foreign Mandarin speakers are recruited abroad to visit Australia for short periods, affecting tourism status, where they follow a script to commit fraud or extortion in a way similar to the boiler-room scams often run by Europeans in South East Asia. This year is is already far worse than the whole of last year.

We can barely contain the laughter. This scam e-mail is the same old same old but unlike so many, it's beautifully written. But what's not funny is that Microsoft and Google continue to facilitate fraudulent conduct.

UK's HMRC secure conviction against PPI claims lead generator

David Buckley, 51, a company director of Basingstoke in England instructed Mahmood Sadiq Poptani, 60, an accountant of Swansea in Wales and together they diverted money collected on behalf of HM Revenue and Customs in respect of income tax and National Insurance deductions from the salaries of staff and value added tax. They are now in jail.

The NCA has been granted freezing orders on eight bank accounts containing a total of more than GBP100 million, which is suspected to have derived from bribery and corruption in an overseas nation.

A report in an Indonesian newspaper, tempo.co, says that a national politician has been arrested by the The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) for alleged involvement in a corruption scheme that saw him net a big lump sum plus something similar to a royalty on every kilo of garlic imported into the country.

There are some aspects of policing that are made more difficult than they should be by a range of factors. One of those factors is attitudes, on both sides, when a crime is committed by members of a "community" against others in that "community."

Intra-community crime is always difficult to investigate because the investigation is, almost always, conducted by someone from outside that "community." The reasons for this are many and varied. Without entering into the choppy waters of arguing that there should be no "communities," only "society," Nigel Morris-Cotterill examines why FCROs are in a difficult position when "communities" and offences within them are considered.

A very convincing e-mail is being distributed. It falsely claims to be from South Africa's ABSA Bank and, so far as this newspaper can tell, is distributed to a spam-list that was first produced by or for the use of a training company since when it has gone into the wild, so to speak. It does not discriminate geographically. It contains an attachment (Credit Card Statement.htm). The full e-mail is below.

At the Financial Crime Forum's 2006 forum in Hong Kong, one session dealt with the trade in endangered species. With the very recent and belated acknowledgement by international bodies that such conduct is, in fact, a financial crime, there is a welcome focus on the profits from such trade rather than solely on the animals and their products. In the USA last week, a bizarre offence came to court but this time, the defendant says, it was nothing to do with profit.

Londoners, pay attention: slag isn't what you think it is. For those from mining communities, slag is what's left over after coal, etc. has been washed. It's poured into conical mountains and left lying around, in theory to dry but occasionally the slurry undermines it and it slides down whatever gradient it is sitting on, sometimes with terrible results, as in the Welsh mining village of Aberfan in 1966. What might be in those "ancient slag" heaps in addition to wet dust? A 77 year old Californian claimed to know and to have a method of extracting the good stuff.

The obligation to train staff for e.g. counter-money laundering purposes is hardly a surprise. But, as Nigel Morris-Cotterill says, the training of temporary and agency staff is often overlooked. As this health and safety case shows, that is not acceptable.

The USA's Inland Revenue Service, the IRS, has reported "a steep drop" in identity fraud related cases in recent years but it is still a serious problem.