hardyp@ballardspahr.com | 215.864.8838 | view full bio
Peter is a national thought leader on money laundering, tax fraud, and other financial crime. He is the author of Criminal Tax, Money Laundering, and Bank Secrecy Act Litigation, a comprehensive legal treatise published by Bloomberg BNA. Peter co-chairs the Practising Law Institute's Anti-Money Laundering program, and serves on the Steering Committee for the Cambridge Forum on Sanctions & AML Compliance
He advises corporations and individuals from many industries against allegations of misconduct ranging from money laundering, tax fraud, mortgage fraud and lending law violations, securities fraud, and public corruption. He also advises on compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act and Anti-Money Laundering requirements. Peter handles complex litigation involving allegations of fraud or other misconduct.
Peter spent more than a decade as a federal prosecutor before entering private practice, serving as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia working on financial crime cases. He was a trial attorney for the Criminal Section of the Department of Justice’s Tax Division in Washington, D.C.
On December 16, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”) issued a 54-page notice of proposed rulemaking (“NPRM”) regarding access by authorized recipients to beneficial ownership information (“BOI”) that will be reported to FinCEN under the Corporate Transparency Act (“CTA”). The CTA requires covered entities –
OFAC Updates Advisory on Enforcement Risks Relating to Agreeing to Pay RansomwareOn September 21, 2021 OFAC issued its first sanctions designation against a virtual currency exchange by designating the virtual currency exchange, SUEX OTC, S.R.O. (SUEX) “for its part in facilitating financial transactions for
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”) just issued another Advisory pertaining to two consumer fraud schemes exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This Advisory focuses on “imposter schemes” and “money mule schemes, ”which we discuss below.
This most recent Advisory is the latest in a string of pronouncements relating to the pandemic by FinCEN, which has stated that it regularly will issue such documents. As we have blogged, FinCEN issued an Advisory on May 18 regarding medical scams related to the pandemic, and issued a companion Notice that “provides detailed filing instructions for financial institutions, which will serve as a reference for future COVID-19 advisories.” On April 3, 2020, FinCEN also updated its March 16, 2020 COVID-19 Notice in order to assist “financial institutions in complying with their Bank Secrecy Act (“BSA”) obligations during the COVID-19 pandemic, and announc[ing] a direct contact mechanism for urgent COVID-19-related issues.”
The most recent Advisory again provides a list of potential red flags that FinCEN believes that financial institutions should be monitoring for, in order to detect, prevent, and report such suspicious activity. As we previously have commented: although such lists can be helpful to financial institutions, they ultimately may impose de facto heightened due diligence requirements. The risk is that, further in time, after memories of the stressors currently imposed by COVID-19 have faded, some regulators may focus only on perceived historical BSA/AML compliance failures and will invoke these lists not merely as efforts by FinCEN to assist financial institutions in deterring crime, but as instances in which FinCEN was putting financial institutions on notice.
Further, the most recent Advisory suffers from the fact that its list of red flags for imposter schemes is best directed at consumers themselves, rather than at financial institutions offering services to consumers: many of the red flags pertain to anomalies in the communications sent directly by fraudsters to targeted consumer victims – information that financial institutions rarely possess.
Continue Reading FinCEN Issues Advisory on COVID-19 and Imposter and Money Mule Schemes
Mossack Fonseca, the beleaguered law firm at the center of the international Panama Papers scandal, has announced that it is closing its doors. The firm cited “reputational deterioration” that has caused “irreversible damage.”
Founded in 1977 by Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca, Mossack Fonseca had been perched at the top of offshore legal services providers until April 2016, when it became ground zero for a global controversy because approximately 11.5 million of the firm’s internal legal and financial documents were leaked to the media. These leaked documents – publicized primarily by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (“ICIJ”) – allegedly reveal a global system of undisclosed offshore accounts, money laundering and tax evasion, and how the rich and powerful around the world use shell companies to conceal assets and possible illegal activity.
The incident is the largest publicly disclosed data breach involving a law firm. Following the April 2016 publication of data, founding partner Ramon Fonseca and other public sources claimed that the firm’s network had been compromised by hackers sometime in 2015. Security researchers and other public sources identified numerous unpatched vulnerabilities in Mossack’s website and email server, which could have been very easily compromised by hackers. Approximately 2.6 terabytes of data – including 4.8 million emails, 3 million database files, and 2.1 million.pdf files – were leaked, including client documents dating back to the 1970s. Approximately one year after the alleged data theft, ICIJ published the Mossack data and set off numerous investigations into the firm and its clients.
Continue Reading “Panama Papers” Law Firm Announces Its Closure Due to Fallout from Massive Data Breach