- DigiPli
Capital One Fined $390 Million
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced on January 15 that Capital One, National Association (Capital One) was fined $390,000,000 for engaging in willful and negligent violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). The violations involved a business unit within its commercial bank called the ‘Check Cashing Group’.

Issues included the following:
The process for investigating suspicious customer transactions was weak and resulted in the failure to fully investigate and report suspicious activity to FinCEN
Failures to detect and report suspicious activity by the check cashers themselves;
Failures to file SARs even when it had actual knowledge of criminal charges against specific customers, including Domenick Pucillo, a convicted associate of the Genovese organized crime family; and
Negligently failing to file CTRs on approximately 50,000 reportable cash transactions representing over $16 billion in cash.
Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of lessons that AML Officers can learn from this action - - it was pretty much just a failure by Capital One to implement basic AML requirements and controls. You can access the FinCEN release here.