Biggest Banks Involved in Moving $2 Trillion Illicit Funds, Reveals FinCEN Documents

And they say bitcoin is used for criminal activities.

The leaked documents of $2 trillion transactions, a tiny proportion of the SARs submitted over the period, revealed that some of the world’s biggest banks have been allowing criminals to move dirty money around the world.

The FinCEN files, having over 2,500 documents, were sent by banks to the US authorities between 2000 and 2017. FinCEN is the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network that combats financial crime and deals with transactions made in the US dollar even if they took place outside the US.

The agency requires the banks to file Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) if their clients are involved in some nefarious activities.

Unlike the number of big leaks regarding financial information over the recent years, including the 2017 Paradise Papers, 2016 Panama Papers, 2015 Swiss Leaks, and 2014 LuxLeaks, this time, not just a few companies but several banks are involved in wrongdoing, which isn’t surprising.

As per the leaked documents, the banks involved were HSBC, JP Morgan, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and Standard Chartered.

The top 5 banks and their dodgy $$ volume implicated in the fincen papers:

Deutsche Bank – $1.3 trillion
JPMorgan Chase – $514 billion
Standard Chartered – $166 billion
Bank of New York Mellon – $64 billion
Barclays – $21 billion

Tell me again how Bitcoin is used by criminals🤪

— KING CO฿IE (@CryptoCobain) September 21, 2020

HSBC allowed fraudsters to move millions of oilers of stolen money, even after learning from the US investigators that the scheme was a scam. In turn, its shares fell 5% to the level last seen in 1995.

Just like HSBC, Standard Chartered’s shares crashed 5%, to a level last seen in 1995. The bank moved cash for Arab Bank for over a decade after clients’ accounts at a Jordanian bank were used in terrorism funding.

The central bank of the United Arab Emirates’ also failed to act on warnings about a local, from which was helping Iran evade sanctions.

In the light of plunging shares of the banks, Binance CEO Chagpeng “CZ” Zhao said, “Might be a good time for their treasury to buy bitcoin?”

Read Also: Out of $1T In Crypto Transactions, Only 1.1% Were Used In Illicit Activities: Chainalysis

While the most prominent investment bank, JP Morgan, allowed a company to more than $1 billion without knowing who owned it, later to be found that it belonged to a mobster, Barclays was used by Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest associates to avoid sanctions. The shares of the bank dipped the most, 6.3%, to the April 2020 level.

Deutsche Bank laundered money for organized crime, terrorists, and drug traffickers and saw its shares tumbling 5.4% to May 2020 level.