March 30 - Cybersecurity experts describe it as a perfect storm: employees working from home — away from their firm's IT experts and sometimes without the protection of a corporate computer network — and hungry for information about a mysterious coronavirus. With the COVID-19 crisis as the backdrop, fraudsters appear to be redoubling their efforts to steal information or money from unsuspecting users, sending fake emails and text messages as bait, in a scheme known as phishing.

March 30 - The European Commission has been slow to enforce reforms necessary to complete its stated mission of curbing money laundering and other illicit financial flows that fuel organized crime and corruption, recent reports show. Global Witness reports found that the EU has been slow in implementing beneficial ownership registers or reforming its golden visa programs, two important measures for combating money laundering. According to Global Witness, most EU member states have not set up accessible beneficial ownership registers, which show who owns which companies in which country. Many of the same countries also have vulnerabilities in their Golden Visa programs, which enables foreigners with ties to corruption to quickly attain citizenship in the EU and stash their money there.

March 30 - A fine levied against Swedbank for money-laundering deficiencies of SEK4 billion (€360 million) on March 19 is far bigger than any Scandinavian financial supervisor has ever levied before. The only such penalty that has been bigger anywhere Europe is a €775 million ING settlement in the Netherlands in 2018. It proves that European anti-money laundering (AML) regulators are finally catching up with the huge fines the US has imposed. It also gives the impression that Sweden is trying hard to mend the reputation of its banking sector after a series of Nordic money-laundering scandals, which the local supervisor Finansinspektionen at first wrongly insisted would not touch Sweden.

March 26 - While crooks and terrorists are as susceptible to COVID-19 as other mortals, underworld cash always seems immune, so Canada’s money-laundering monitor has begun triaging financial transaction reports during the pandemic. Staffing shortages and business disruption forced by the coronavirus prompted the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, known as FINTRAC, to adjust reporting requirements Wednesday.

March 26 - A 58-year-old Ottawa woman is wanted on an arrest warrant on charges of fraud over $5,000 and laundering the proceeds of crime. It’s in connection with cheques she’s alleged to have written to herself while she was the interim president and treasurer of an unnamed local union, the Ottawa Police Service said Thursday.

March 23 - Malta's Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) has reported a 157% increase in suspicious transaction reports (STRs) in 2019 from 2017, with 2,778 STRs received. The anti-money laundering unit also reported an unprecedented increase in the number of requests for information received from other domestic authorities especially supervisory authorities.

March 22 - A large majority of members states failed to introduce by 10 January public registers to reveal the true owners of all companies based in their countries, as part of the fight against money laundering, a report published on Friday (20 March) revealed. Transparency regarding companies’ beneficial owners is one of the key points of the fifth update to EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD). An analysis of the 27 member states, made by Global Witness, an NGO that focuses on corruption issues, showed that only five countries have implemented a public register which is free to access.