Elevate your Compliance with Intelect Group. Our monthly round up of news items which are of particular relevance to those businesses regulated for the purposes of Anti-Money Laundering.
‘We prevent bad things happening to good people and their businesses’.
Cyber Security
Digital arrest scams
A woman in Delhi found herself under “digital arrest” last week – an emerging form of scam where victims make payments to criminals posing as law enforcement officers.
The woman was called by people posing as officers from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) – India’s equivalent of the FBI.
The callers claimed that her husband had been charged with crimes. If she paid to secure his release, then all charges would be dropped, and the story would not be released to the press.
The scammer coerced the victim into staying on the phone for six hours, claiming the long call was a ‘digital arrest’ she made one payment of around £1800 and was preparing to make another when her husband walked through the door.
Note – These types of scams tend to get recycled and travel quickly, with jurisdictional equivalents emerging. Be on your guard for calls of this nature, you will not be asked to make payment over the phone by a genuine law enforcement agency.
Organised Crime
Forged documentation
Fake documents are alive and well as a recent case illustrates.
A Nigerian Organised Crime Group forged over 2000 marriage certificates which allowed people to move to the UK illegally.
The defendants, who were described as ‘prolific and have now been jailed for a total of 13 years in their desire to abuse the UK’s borders’, conspired to make fraudulent EU Settlement Scheme applications between March 2019 and May 2023.
They provided false Nigerian Customary Marriage Certificates and other fraudulent documentation to support the applications of Nigerian nationals to remain in the UK.
The investigation, which was led by Home Office Criminal and Financial Investigators, working alongside partner agencies in Nigeria Home Office discovered more than 2,000 false marriage documents forged by the gang.
Note – From an AML Compliance point of view it is clear that the forged document business is alive and well and all any paperwork surrendered as part of the onboarding process should be very carefully scrutinised.
Regulatory
How well do you know the people that work for your business?
A former private banker, Peter Georgiou, at MMEL Mirabaud (Middle East) Limited, has been fined $980,020 and banned from holding any office or working for a Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) firm. He is now also restricted from providing financial services in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC).
Here are just some of the things the authority discovered about Georgiou during their investigation,
He deliberately misled MMEL’s compliance team and withheld crucial information to bypass MMEL’s anti-money laundering (AML) systems and controls.
He sent a forged, deceptive email to a client.
He provided false information to the DFSA during an interview.
He was found to have played a role in MMEL’s failure to conduct due diligence
Note – It’s not just policies and procedures you need to monitor as a compliance officer.
