Banks unleash paper tigers over terror data probe
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'We've written some letters' British banks have responded to European privacy watchdogs, who claim they broke the law by letting US anti-terror investigators have access to the details of their customers' international financial transactions.â¦
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ONDON, Aug. 17  The British police today charged eight men with conspiracy to murder and terrorism after finding that they possessed reconnaissance information on financial centers in Washington, New York and New Jersey that were ...
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According to a report by the US Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Infobank of Belarus has been involved in money laundering using Cayman companies.
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The Bank of England has frozen the assets of a London-based Saudi opposition group whose leader is suspected of being a supporter of terrorist group al-Qaeda.
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SEC launches software tool to provide info on companies doing business in terrorist states.
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Spending by banks and financial institutions on defending themselves against money laundering is soaring, a survey finds.
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Firms worried by terrorists, animal rights activists and hackers have spent Â£1m on extra security this year, says a survey.
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Organisations are risking seeing sensitive information ending up in the wrong hands, because they are failing to ensure that their unwanted PCs are properly datawiped.
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The information commissioner on Wednesday hit out at a number of banks and government departments for &quot;horrifying&quot; breaches of the country&#39;s data protection rules.
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The transfer of confidential banking records by a Belgium-based company to U.S. authorities for use in anti-terrorism investigations breached Belgian and likely European Union data privacy rules, top government ...Comment
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Banks may be taking cards  from reliable customers and giving them instead to riskier ones, an MP fears.
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Financial institutions are asking law enforcement and regulators to share more data to better combat fraud.
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(InfoWorld) - Fraud investigators are struggling to cope with vast quantities of data sent to them by financial institutions, meaning some crimes may go uninvestigated or even unnoticed, experts said on Wednesday. The issue is prompting banks and other financial institutions to ask law enforcement and regulators to share with them more of the data they have aboutÂ suspicious transactions, in order to better combat fraud. Banks and transfer agencies are required by regulators in the U.S. and the U.K. to file reports when they detect a potentially illegal transaction, said Olga Maitland, head of the International Association of Money Transfer Networks, at the Fraud World 2007 conference in London. Up to 300,000 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are filed per month in the U.S., and up to 200,000 a year in the U.K., but most of those reports "disappear into a black hole" because law enforcement agencies don't have the resources to investigate each one, she said. If another financial institution is mentioned in a report, it may not even know about the suspicious activity if the report is filed by a different institution. "If there is indeed a crime taking place, then that is carrying on undetected," Maitland said. Colin Woodcock, head of the fraud section for the U.K.'s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), said the SARs program has resulted in "huge amounts of information ... which it was difficult to do anything with." "Let's not forget they are suspicious activity reports," Woodcock said during a panel discussion. "Now, if the police or anybody really were expected to act on everything that is suspicious, we would be bogged down in the first five seconds of operation." The quantity of reports has also created a need for greater computing power, he said. The U.K. has made some progress, according to Woodcock, and opened up access to the SARs database to other police forces such as HM Revenue and Customs, the U.K.'s tax authority, which can use it for their own investigations, he said. But sharing the SARs data with financial institutions raises huge concerns around confidentiality and privacy, Woodcock said. It could mean the disclosure of "very embarrassing" information about banks, he said. SARs were "given to us by industry to make the best use law enforcement can make of it, not to go and share it with everybody and say 'Look at what NatWest just told us," he said. "There are huge problems there." (NatWest is a major U.K. bank.) SOCA has started issuing alerts about problem trends, Woodcock said, but Maitland countered that the information is not in-depth. Money transfer networks have blossomed into a trillian-dollar industry. If SOCA can share its information more, by being "less restrictive, less confidential," it would lead to a greater reduction in fraud, Maitland said.
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Germany's biggest bank - Deutsche Bank - is being investigated on suspicion that it may have manipulated its balance sheet.
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Malaysia's securities watchdog said Monday it has frozen two local bank accounts, shut down two Web sites and questioned several people suspected to be involved in a global Internet investment scam.
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Deutsche Bank - is being investigated on suspicion it may have manipulated its balance sheet, the AFP news agency has reported.
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The company will provide evidence that banks had detailed information about the risks posed by ill-fated subprime mortgages.