Capital One is fined once again by FinCEN

Capital One, the bank that has lately dominated celebrity billboards in the industry and claims to have "reinvented" banking, has now been fined - second - by the authorities for "willful" failure to combat money laundering Times within six months. The Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) fined America's fifth largest credit card issuer a $ 390 million fine for willful and negligent violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money laundering act. FinCEN said in a statement that Capital One has admitted that it has failed to file "thousands of suspicious activity reports" and "thousands of currency transaction reports" relating to a business entity known as Check Cashing Group "The violations occurred at least from 2008 to 2014 and resulted in millions of dollars in suspicious transactions not being reported in a timely and accurate manner," FinCEN added. Capital One acquired the check cashing group when it bought New York-based North Fork Bank in 2006 for $ 14.6 billion, and closed it 8 years later. Capital One admitted that it has not filed any reports of suspicious activity related to Domenick Pucillo, who owned numerous check cashing businesses in the New York area, but was also a convicted member of the Genoese organized crime family. FinCEN said that despite being notified of Pucillo's connection to criminal activity in 2013, the bank continued to process over 20,000 transactions valued at approximately $ 160 million. Still, this was not the only wrongdoing at Capital One, nor is the bank the only culprit. Last August, the US Treasury Department fined the bank $ 80 million for negligent network security practices after a single hacker accessed the personal information of more than 100 million customers of the bank. To date, the incident is the largest data breach that has ever occurred in the financial services sector. Seattle-based software engineer Paige Thompson, 33, hacked into a Capital One client data server and gained access to 140,000 social security numbers, 1 million Canadian social security numbers, and 80,000 bank account numbers. Although social security numbers were not affected, the break-in included the names, addresses, zip codes, phone numbers, email addresses, and dates of birth of those who applied for a credit card at the US bank between 2005 and 2019. Thompson, who has pleaded not guilty and is still on trial, previously worked for Amazon Web Services, which hosted the Capital One database. In 2018, Bank of America was fined $ 42 million for tricking clients into believing that their stock deals were being handled internally when in fact they were being passed on to a third party. But it's also not the first time Bank of America has been fined for violations. It has paid $ 76 billion in fines since the 2008 financial crisis. A few years ago the fourth largest bank in America, Wells Fargo, was fined billions by the US trade regulator for charging unauthorized overdraft fees on millions of customer accounts. In total, banks have had to pay $ 243 billion in fines since the financial crisis, according to a list compiled by Keefe, Bruyette and Woods in 2018. JPMorgan Chase ranks second on the list with nearly $ 44 billion in fines.