Upon receipt of a Suspicious Activity Report from a bank, the Federal Bureau of Investigation initiated a bank and mail/wire fraud investigation involving a purported charity raising money for needy people in a Middle Eastern country. The Suspicious Activity Report identified a series of checks…
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SARs helped identify additional aliases, associates, and businesses of an individual that acted as a credit card ‘bust-out’ recruiter. As a recruiter, the subject assisted other individuals (usually from the same ethnic group and experiencing financial or personal difficulties) in escaping their…
Information from SARs helped unravel a complex fraudulent banking scheme in which victims lost thousands of dollars to fake investments and a multinational financial institution had its identity stolen.
The scheme to defraud investors allegedly started in late 2002, when an individual…
In a case initiated from a proactive review of SARs, an individual pled guilty to fraud when authorities discovered a scheme to defraud individuals and businesses out of millions of dollars. The SARs which triggered the investigation described in detail transactions related to the fraud. In…
In a case that is part of a large-scale investigation into organized retail theft (ORT) rings, a federal jury convicted an individual of multiple counts related to laundering the proceeds from the criminal activity. Investigators found Suspicious Activity Reports filed on the defendant very…
In early 2012, FinCEN conducted outreach to all of its state and local law enforcement partners, and asked for cases where FinCEN data played a useful role in their investigations. Below, in their own words, is an example of how FinCEN's stakeholders use FinCEN data. It has been edited only for…
A federal credit union filed a SAR and helped initiate an investigation into a counterfeit check scheme that had similarities with Nigerian 419 fraud schemes. These frauds, designated as such because of the section of the Nigerian criminal code that prohibits them, often promise substantial…
A retail store owner, who operated an unlicensed hawala (a form of an informal value transfer system), was sentenced to multiple months in prison and several years’ probation. The defendant pled guilty to failure to register as a money services business as required by FinCEN and to filing a…
In April 2002, predicated by numerous SAR filings by two large banks, the FBI initiated an investigation into an investment scam. The SARs were filed on numerous personal and business accounts with no obvious relationships to one another. Bank personnel eventually linked all accounts through the…
The United States Secret Service, New York Field Office, seized over $5.3 million from a correspondent account for a bank headquartered in Nigeria. Investigative leads derived from Bank Secrecy Act data determined that this account was actually owned by the Nigerian bank and operated by the bank…