April 25 - Against the backdrop of the financial revolution via the internet, India has forever navigated that thin line between innovation and regulation. While the emergence of cryptocurrency has ushered in unprecedented opportunity, it has ushered in equally potent peril as well: cryptocurrency money laundering. As the volumes of blockchain-based transactions expand and become more complicated, so expands the threat of such systems being manipulated by rogues. India's policymakers, regulators, and police are struggling to keep pace. Here we examine how India is fighting back against money laundering with the use of targeted policy, technological monitoring, and cross-border cooperation — and what is yet to be closed.

April 25 - There is a robust international network working to prevent money laundering. It’s called the FATF (Financial Action Task Force). It has headquarters in Paris and works through nine regional satellite organizations on every continent except Antarctica. It provides guidance to more than 100 countries on anti-money laundering best-practices, and it puts offenders and scofflaws on either a greylist (naughty) or blacklist (criminal) as a way to herd all these cats. Now, the US has stepped back from its leadership role in the fight against financial crime. For an administration that is in the first inning, it is a breathtaking list of reversals.

April 24 - While there have been numerous shifts in government enforcement priorities in the past three months, there does appear to be one area where the status quo has remained the same. This new administration has made it clear that preventing financial institutions from working with terrorist organizations remains a top concern. While the administration has added “new” entities to its lists in the form of drug cartels and other nefarious groups, none of this changes the fact that it is as important as ever for banks and similar financial institutions to maintain effective compliance to avoid the government’s crosshairs. Moreover, if one of these banned entities does become inadvertently involved with a financial institution, it is equally as important to know how to get in front of the issue to mitigate the relevant and serious risk.

April 22 - Brazil’s federal police recently pulled back the curtain on a criminal web that had infiltrated the country’s fuel distribution chains. What looked like ordinary gas stations were, in fact, outposts of a vast laundering machine, washing dirty money with diesel and ethanol. According to Justice Minister Ricardo Lewandowski, more than 1,000 service stations across the country were overseen by organised crime syndicates. The plot thickened when Rio de Janeiro’s state police launched raids against the so-called “fuel mafia”, dismantling a racket that sold millions of liters of adulterated fuel. In the process, they revealed a network of ghost companies churning out fake invoices.

April 22 - The cryptocurrency giant Binance has achieved a significant legal victory: a federal judge has approved the transfer of a money laundering case from the state of Washington to the Southern District of Florida, where a similar proceeding is already underway. The decision, issued on April 21 by Judge Barbara Rothstein, is based on the so-called “first-to-file rule”. This is a rule aimed at avoiding the duplication of legal proceedings.