Navigating New Compliance Challenges: The Impact of the Money Transmitter Modernization Act on Payroll Processing - Payments Pros – The Payments Law Podcast
On May 22, a Florida appellate court set aside the state’s Office of Financial Regulation (OFR) Emergency Suspension Order (ESO), suspending a Florida-based digital assets company’s (Petitioner) money services business (MSB)...more
• Highlights of recent joint agency guidance on Third-Party Risk Management (3PRM) • How 3PRM considerations have increased in importance in BSA/AML compliance programs and enforcement actions • Lessons learned from...more
On July 28th, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), reintroduced the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act (the “Act”), legislation aimed at closing...more
Legislation Targets Unhosted Wallets, Validators and Digital Asset ATMs - On July 28th, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), reintroduced the...more
U.S. regulators are signaling heightened expectations for anti-money laundering compliance within the crypto industry. Although FinCEN issued guidance in 2013 interpreting virtual currency “administrators” and “exchanges” as...more
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) often involve two areas with known money laundering and terrorist financing risks: cryptocurrencies and high-value assets, like art. As detailed below, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial...more
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (“Treasury”) has made clear that businesses engaging in certain activities involving virtual currencies are subject to registration,...more
Recently proposed regulations could present significant compliance burdens for the banks and money service businesses that engage in cryptocurrency transactions with unhosted wallets or wallets held in jurisdictions specified...more
Building off a 2018 alert outlining cyber threats generally, and following the federal indictment for money laundering of the founders of the offshore cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, on Oct. 8, 2020, the U.S. Department of...more
On October 8, 2020, Attorney General William Barr announced the release of a Cryptocurrency Enforcement Framework produced by the Department of Justice (DOJ) Cyber-Digital Task Force. The 83-page framework is intended to help...more
By now, most everyone knows that ransomware is software that infects your computer system, makes your data irretrievable and usually breaks things along the way. To unlock your system, the bad guys (or girls) demand you pay a...more
In response to the significant rise in ransomware attacks since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and just in time for Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network...more
FinCEN Director Ken Blanco addressed this year’s Consensus Blockchain Conference on May 13, 2020. In a set of prepared remarks, Blanco recognized the unprecedented challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic has created for...more
First in a Two-Post Series - The U.S. Department of Treasury (“Treasury”) has issued its 2020 National Strategy for Combating Terrorist and Other Illicit Financing (“2020 Strategy”)....more
Leaders of FinCEN, CFTC and SEC Attempt an Intricate Dance of Competing Oversight of Virtual Currency - On October 11, the leaders of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”), the Commodity Futures Trading...more
Last Wednesday, FinCEN Deputy Director Jamal El-Hindi appeared at the annual conference of the Money Transmitter Regulators Association and delivered prepared remarks. The topics of his address covered three issues of...more
On August 21, 2019, FinCEN issued an advisory (the “Advisory”) alerting financial institutions to various financial schemes and mechanisms employed by fentanyl and synthetic opioid traffickers to facilitate the illegal...more
Some Answers — Producing Even More Questions - On May 9, 2019, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”) published a comprehensive “interpretive guidance” (the “Guidance”) to “remind” businesses and individuals...more
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is the U.S. Treasury Department bureau charged with monitoring financial transactions in order to combat domestic and international money laundering, terrorist financing and...more
For the past several years, advocates of crypto assets and other public uses of blockchain technology have sought guidance from U.S. regulators regarding the legal implications of new or novel uses of that technology....more
First Post in a Two-Part Series - Recent actions in the crypto realm demonstrate that authorities and regulators have not slackened their commitment to applying and enforcing Anti-Money Laundering (“AML”) laws and...more
Last week, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) backed up its strong public statements about enforcing the anti-money laundering (AML) laws with respect to cryptocurrency by bringing an enforcement action against...more
“V-bucks,” the in-game virtual value currency of the wildly popular video game, Fortnite, is reportedly being used to launder the proceeds of stolen credit cards....more
More trouble for Wells Fargo, as news emerged yesterday that some employees in the company’s business banking wholesale unit “altered information on documents related to corporate customers” without customers’...more
Investors in Virtual Currency (VC) utilize the services of on-line “secure” platforms for buying, selling, transferring, and storing VC. The providers of these services are known as web-wallets (Coinbase is an example). ...more