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Failure to Prevent" laws are not new and nor is the concept behind them. But they are increasingly important for Financial Crime Risk and Compliance Officers and Internal Auditors.

To explain the concepts in the "Failure to Prevent" series of Financial Crime Fora, Nigel Morris-Cotterill will present a one-hour talk on Tuesday 25th April, 2023.

In the film, The Transporter, there are several rules for using the courier service Jason Statham offers. One is "Don't open the package."

In this utterly ridiculous spam-scam, someone using a gmail address that Google should be required to verify rights to but chooses not to, is pretending to be a courier - and to know what's in the package. The silly thing is that even if he was a courier and even if he did open the package he would not know the information upon which the fraud is predicated.

As spam-scams go, this is one of the most rubbish.

The National Crime Agency in the UK is at the leading edge of online child abuse and convictions are increasingly frequent. Usually, cases involve international investigations and the negotiating of relationships with multiple overseas agencies. But sometimes the case is entirely domestic, in more senses than one. And then prosecutions can be quick, as a man and his cohabitee who formed a team of abusers found out yesterday.

This spam-scam is remarkable. It's as if the sender thinks that by throwing everything at the wall, something will stick. But for the even slightly alert, it fails before the target even opens it.

As governments around the world ponder the possibility of making banks liable for losses suffered by customers who are the victims of e.g. phishing scams, there are companies that actively assist the fraudsters to get away with it. Let's start at the top: Google.

Clearview AI Inc. is a company that collects facial images from a disparate range of sources and makes them available to its customers.

The UK's data protection department, the Information Commissioner's Office, has banned the practice within the UK. The UK acted in concert with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. The investigations focused on Clearview AI Inc’s use of people’s images, data scraping from the internet and the use of biometric data for facial recognition.

What effect might that have on remote verification?

"Go back to the data." "The answer's in the data." "Data is the key".

Maybe.

Until it goes wrong.

"LAST & FINAL WARNING NOTICE" screams the headline with the target's email address added for good effect.

And it goes downhill from there.

Fake from address: Bar.Petermantle@Un.org
Reply address: Bar.Petermantle@yandex.com

A Los Angeles man was sentenced this week to 240 months in federal prison for operating a Ponzi scheme that raised at least USD650 million with bogus claims that investor money would be used to acquire licensing rights to films that HBO and Netflix purportedly had agreed to distribute abroad.

Be prepared to be amazed.

Stefan Cassella, principal of Asset Forfeiture Law LLC in the USA has produced a fascinating list of cases in which the USA, at a federal level, has used civil forfeiture in relation to proceeds of criminal conduct and assets used in the commission of offences. Many of the cases are in rem. The USA is not the only country to pursue such assets but it is unusually active in the use of in rem (i.e. against the asset compared with against the person) actions in doing so. The list demonstrates an extraordinary range of criminal conduct and of assets forfeited (isn't that a much better description than "recovered"?)

It's been modified from the advance fee fraud e-mails that we are used to and someone has been to writing lessons.

It starts with an unusual approach, then moves into the same technique as we've seen from this name dozens of times over many years.

Oh, and he uses UN.ORG as the "from" address. Cheeky.

Here's our pick of the day's top five financial crime related stories picked up around the 'web.

Today's top five stories in financial crime risk and compliance.

Today's Top Five Financial Crime Risk and Compliance stories.