Category Archives: Uncategorized

When will the US DOJ and the Treasury draw the line?

A bill designed to regulate the world of art and antiquities entitled, The Enablers Act, was introduced last year and passed a House vote, but then quietly died on the Senate floor in December. It is not the last we will see or hear of this bill, or something very similar, and that is because the art world’s days of operating as a washing machine for the wealthy and the corrupt are coming to an end. The United States government has had enough of the art world’s rampant tax evasion and will soon impose compliance on the market, one way or another.

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According to the US Department of Justice, Connor Pennington, of Washington DC, pleaded guilty on January 30 to laundering roughly $3.5 million, which was generated by the illegal sale of marijuana. Pennington was the CEO of a company called JointVentures, which operated under the name “Joint Delivery” and served as a delivery service for a variety of cannabis products, including pot, vape cartridges, wax, and edibles. The natural reaction to hearing this news without diving deeper is surprise, as JointVentures sounds like a legit cannabis business conducting legitimate business. The problem? JointVentures was never licensed as a medical marijuana dispensary in any state or in the District of Columbia, where cannabis is legal

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Cannabis is a growth industry that is in dire need of banking services, but minus a federal-level approval to legalize (and regulate) the drug for recreational use that won’t happen. The nation’s big banks are not going to take that risk, even if they are ready to. Federal legalization of cannabis would launch a pre-orchestrated move by the nation’s banking system to quickly integrate with the cannabis industry, and generate a collective sigh of relief from dispensary owners who are tired of dealing in cash and the crimes associated with it.

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2022 was a banner year for money launderers and financial crooks. In an effort to provide my readers with the year’s top compliance and crime related news I pulled out the top news from each month in 2022, and laid it out below for your review.

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Former FBI Special Agent Charles F. McGonigal was arrested at JFK Airport last week along with co-conspirator Sergey Shestakov, and charged with, “violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”) and with conspiring to commit money laundering and money laundering,” according to a press release issued by the US Department of Justice on January 23, 2023.

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Female head of a professional money laundering syndicate busted

2022’s news cycle was dominated by cryptocurrency crimes. It is hard to call them FinCrimes, simply because at this point, post FTX scandal, I wonder if crypto was ever a real currency. It seems like more of a scam than anything; a scam that is costing a lot of people a lot of real money. That’s why in 2023 you will start to see a shift in the headlines as the crooks move away from Bitcoin and back to what they know — cold, hard cash.

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Crypto Crashes into the Christmas Season Like Avalanche

Is it ironic that crypto is crashing Christmas? I think so, considering that cryptocurrency was supposed to be like Santa; a savior for the forgotten and maligned. Instead it turned itself into a pump and dump scheme on a scale that has SEC and Wall Street veterans shaking their heads in disgust, jealousy and a tad of melancholy that the decentralized currency experiment might not survive the first quarter of 2023. The rumors might be coming true!

Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turogin, each 37 years old, were arrested in Estonia last week and are being extradited to the United States to face charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. This case sort of hits close to home as I reside in the Pacific Northwest and the indictment for the crooks was unsealed in a US District Court in Seattle. In addition, a handful of victims of the pair’s crypto-based scheme are residents of western Washington.

Perspective is a powerful thing. It prevents us from making or repeating critical life errors, or it gives us an infusion of empathy when, for example, you realize that the person who stole your parking space at the grocery store was on their way home from a chemotherapy session.

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FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has had a horrible November and it just keeps getting worse. Last Tuesday news broke that Bankman-Fried is being sued by his investors for $11 billion (USD) in the U.S. District Court in Miami, along with those that promoted the FTX brand. That list includes a number of high profile celebrities and athletes, including Tom Brady, Larry David, Shaquille O’Neal and Stephen Curry (no!), among others. The proposed class action, which was filed yesterday afternoon, accuses the laundry list of wealthy defendants of promoting unregistered securities, a violation of Florida’s Securities and Investor Protection Act and the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.

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