Bank charge test case 'needed'
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Bank customers trying to reclaim overdraft charges will face a lottery unless a test case is heard, a judge warns.
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There is "enough evidence" against a man accused of murdering Robert McCartney for a crown court trial.
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Business & money: Britain's third largest bank first  to admit it is feeling financial pain of customers reclaiming overdraft and other fees.
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Prosecutors in the Michael Jackson trial seek to admit evidence of newly unearthed  "prior offences" by the singer.
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Guernsey authorities are being asked to force a bank to provide payment details that may be linked to an alleged Equatorial Guinea coup plot.
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Charging current account fees may be "fairer" than offering free banking, a leading industry figure says.
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Questions to be asked over whether there was ever a realistic chance of prosecutions.
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Dozens of bank charges cases are settled after the judge threatens to use some of them as a legal test case.
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Looking for mistakes or fraud can take close examination.
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Unfair bank charges harm people on low incomes and need more regulation, a consumer watchdog says.
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Three British bankers accused of a multi-million pound fraud involving Enron officials should be tried in the United States, a court ruled today.
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A senior prosecutor recommended that Daniel Bouton be questioned by judges in connection with accusations he has made about a rogue traderâs role in SociÃ©tÃ© GÃ©nÃ©raleâs loss of billions of euros.
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Credit card company MasterCard drew a  rebuke at a closed European Commission antitrust hearing last  week after claiming incorrectly that Britain had dropped an  investigation into its fees, people who were present said.
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Prosecutors in Michael Jacksonâs child molestation case want to introduce evidence that the singer allegedly committed other sex crimes over the years that went uncharged.
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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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Prosecutors say they have 'all the evidence we need to make a decision' on whether to bring charges in cash-for-honours affair.
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Major banks being investigated by the Commerce Commission for not properly disclosing credit card fees, insisted yesterday they have been upfront with the public over the fees for the past few years.