Links in “Financial Crime”

An Indianapolis man, Tom Coughlin, used two fake credit unions, Oxford International Credit Union and Oxford International Cooperative, to sell fraudulent investments to more than 5,000 individuals, most in the United States. To support the fraud, he developed a fake website that showed the online investors that they were receiving the touted return and that claimed that the credit union accounts were privately insured. [4/14]

FFIEC's statements last week take a look at cyber-attacks on ATMs and card authorization and DDoS attacks on websites. In one, hackers targeted ATMs by installing malware that allowed for unlimited withdrawals, beyond the available balance, resulting in $40 million in fraud using only 12 stolen debit accounts. [4/9]

As remote deposit capture grows in popularity among consumers, not just businesses, the most common form of RDC fraud is "duplicate presentment," where the check is deposited via mobile device, then the paper check is deposited in a different bank as well. [4/8]

Check fraud remains the most common type of fraud, but debit and credit card fraud hit 43% of organizations in this survey, up from 29% last year. [4/7]

Investing $24 billion since 2005, IBM launches big data software designed to aggregate information from a variety of sources to find non-obvious relationships and co-occurrences between entities to address all kinds of fraud and financial crimes. [3/21]

Plaintiff alleges Chase flooded courts for years seeking to obtain default judgements using "improper, incorrect and fraudulent affidavits" executed by employees "thousands at a time" and notarized without notaries witnessing the execution of the documents. [3/19]

Numerous credit union members have filed civil suits against Alabama One CU alleging they were encouraged to take out personal loans and then lend the proceeds to businessman Danny Ray Butler in order to help him pay off his $20 million dollar loan to the credit union. Butler, who was indicted last year for bank fraud, has signed a plea agreement with federal prosecutors to provide information about others who knew about his crimes. [3/17]

Despite public statements by the Department of Justice that mortgage fraud is a high priority, the Office of the Inspector General finds instances that indicate a low prioritization, such as the FBI's ranking of mortgage fraud as the lowest ranked criminal threat in its lowest crime category. [3/17]

Of all consumer complaints, identity-theft-related complaints topped the list at 14%. Here are some resources provided by the Federal Trade Commission to help educate consumers. [3/17]

Bankruptcy attorney produces 150-page document that she says was Wells Fargo's how-to guide for fabricating evidence of ownership. [3/17]