Kiwi Farms

A bunch of documents acquired by journalists primarily made up of leaked SAR reports (disclosure a financial institution makes to FinCEN notifying them of potential suspicious activity) to US FinCEN and other documents obtained through FOIA. Show major banks either knowingly moved money for criminals or turned a blind eye to suspicious activity. Brief summary from the BBC:

  • HSBC allowed fraudsters to move millions of dollars of stolen money around the world, even after it learned from US investigators the scheme was a scam.
  • JP Morgan allowed a company to move more than $1bn through a London account without knowing who owned it. The bank later discovered the company might be owned by a mobster on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.
  • Evidence that one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest associates used Barclays Bank in London to avoid sanctions which were meant to stop him using financial services in the West. Some of the cash was used to buy works of art.
  • The UK is called a "higher risk jurisdiction" like Cyprus, according to the intelligence division of FinCEN. That's because of the number of UK registered companies that appear in the SARs. Over 3,000 UK companies are named in the FinCEN files - more than any other country.
  • The United Arab Emirates' central bank failed to act on warnings about a local firm which was helping Iran evade sanctions.
  • Deutsche Bank moved money launderers' dirty money for organised crime, terrorists and drug traffickers. More details (BuzzFeed News)
  • Standard Chartered moved cash for Arab Bank for more than a decade after clients' accounts at the Jordanian bank had been used in funding terrorism.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54226107
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...2tn-of-possibly-corrupt-us-financial-activity
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https://finance.yahoo.com/news/finc...0JOwPLEiT6cmIOaYGlAcoLChDESUT6uKo23PeY9chazf1
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Edit:
ICIJ summary: https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/what-is-the-fincen-files-investigation/
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Document Cloud link with some of the files journalists made public: https://www.documentcloud.org/public/search/Project: "FinCEN Files"

Do you think anything will actually come of this? My guess is after an initial flurry of stories on the news this will be quickly swept into the memory hole like other similar leaks in recent years.
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