By Stephen Rae
The FinCEN Files are a data dump of 2,657 documents, at the heart of which are 2,100 suspicious activity reports, or SARs.
FinCEN is the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network – the U.S. Treasury’s anti-money laundering agency. It has been known for some that the agency suffered a major security breach with files being leaked to the media – and today all that data was published by news organisations across the globe.
The work was being coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which was behind the Panama Papers and a number of other “data leak” projects along with Buzzfeed News in the US and Suddeutsche Zeitung in Germany. The BBC published the data in Britain.
Ahead of the damaging reports FinCEN said in a statement it was “aware that various media outlets intend to publish a series of articles based on unlawfully disclosed SARs, as well as other sensitive government documents, from several years ago”. ICIJ has not responded to requests for comment.
Leaking the financial intelligence unit’s (FIU) data or publishing details of a SARs is a criminal offence under the US’s Bank Secrecy Act 1970and other federal laws and include a fine of up to $250,000 and five-year jail term for each offense.
SARs are not evidence of wrongdoing – banks send them to the authorities if they suspect a customer’s transactions.
By law, they have to know who their clients are – it’s not enough to file SARs and keep taking dirty money from clients while expecting enforcers to deal with the problem. If they have evidence of criminal activity, they should stop moving the cash.
The leak shows how money was laundered through some of the world’s biggest banks and how criminals used anonymous companies around the world to hide their money.
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