Hello! It’s June 6, and we’re tracking today’s top stories: SEC sues Coinbase, doubts about sanctions effectiveness, a Bulgarian mobster gunned down in South Africa knew too much, Mar-a-Lago pool flood raises suspicions, and much more…

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Bespoke Intelligence, Terrorism, and Security Solutions.

Featured Story

🎯SEC sues Coinbase over exchange and staking programs. “We allege that Coinbase, despite being subject to the securities laws, commingled and unlawfully offered exchange, broker-dealer, and clearinghouse functions,” said SEC chair Gary Gensler. [more]

Top Stories

🔸Washington is sanctioning 12,000 entities. It’s backfiring. Nobody can deny that the targets of U.S. sanctions are deserving of censure, but it’s not clear what, if anything, all these sanctions are achieving. [more]

🔸Illicit Edge Insights: 10 Common Critiques of America's Financial Sanctions Regime. [more]

🔸Did The Bulgarian Mobster Gunned Down In South Africa Know Too Much? Kamenov was found shot dead along with his wife and two others in their home in a suburb of Cape Town early on May 25th. [more]

🔸Mar-a-Lago pool flood raises suspicions among prosecutors in Trump classified documents case. An employee at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence drained the resort’s swimming pool last October and ended up flooding a room where computer servers containing surveillance video logs were kept. [more]

🔸House GOP zeroes in on FBI Director Wray. The Oversight Committee plans a first move on Thursday unless the bureau hands over a copy of a document Republicans say ties the president to explosive allegations. [more]

🔸BRICS Raging Against the Dollar Is an Exercise in Futility. If OPEC can’t come up with a petro-currency, what chance does a random bunch of geographically disparate nations have? [more]

🔸Iraq Is Falling Apart: Iran’s Proxies Have Seized Power in Baghdad – and Are Gutting the State. Iran’s allies have achieved unprecedented control of Iraq’s parliament, judiciary, and executive branch, and they are rapidly looting the state of its resources. [more]

🔸Hacking Spree Feared After Breach of File-Sharing Software. The BBC, British Airways and Nova Scotia's government are confirmed victims. [more]

🔸Austrian banker loses fight against extradition to U.S. on Odebrecht charges. Peter Weinzierl – former chief executive of Meinl Bank – is accused of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars to bribe public officials. [more]

Terrorist Financing Analysis: An E-Learning Course We teach researchers and counter-terrorism practitioners how to detect and disrupt terrorist financing. Learn more!

IN THE NEWS

Russia & China

🔸Sanctions on Russia may not be working – we now know why. European businesses and third countries are actively circumventing sanctions, providing Russia with sanctioned goods and thus helping its war effort. [more]

🔸Chinese organized crime laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. Chinese criminal organizations are operating in the U.S. and working with Mexican cartels in what the DEA says is sophisticated money laundering operation. [video]

🔸Kentucky pauses incentives for battery maker whose federal loan was nixed after claims of China ties. Kentucky officials say they won’t start paying out $21 million in economic incentives until the company explains why the U.S. Department of Energy abruptly rejected a $200 million loan. [more]

🔸China Edging Out Russia as Sanctions Redraw Trade for Kazakhstan. In the over three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia held on to its spot as the biggest trading partner for Kazakhstan even as China made inroads across much of the region. [more]

Corruption & Financial Crime

🔸Ten Arrested In North Macedonia In People-Smuggling Raids. Police described the group as a sophisticated criminal organization that operated routes between Greece and Hungary as well as from Bulgaria and Serbia to various destinations in the European Union. [more]

🔸‘Very last warning’ for 82-year-old German convicted of dealing marijuana. Retired seaman, who has 24 previous convictions, avoids jail despite prosecutors’ call for prison term. [more]

🔸Border Patrol K-9 sniffs out $2M in fentanyl — enough to kill 48M people — during traffic stop in Arizona. The amount of fentanyl seized during the traffic stop was more than the total amount of fentanyl seized during the entirety of Fiscal Year 2022 in the Yuma Sector. [more]

Delve into terrorist financing case studies, ranging from how groups and organizations finance their activities to how specific attacks were funded.  Enroll today!

Cyber & Crypto

🔸How Hackers Can Up Their Game by Using ChatGPT. Artificial intelligence, by mimicking the writing style of individuals, can make cyberattacks much harder to detect. [more]

🔸Ex-Vikings part owner gets over 6 years in AAF crypto scam. A former part owner of the Minnesota Vikings who defrauded a short-lived professional football league in a $700 million cryptocurrency scam was sentenced to over six years. [more]

🔸Magento, WooCommerce, WordPress, and Shopify Exploited in Web Skimmer Attack. The idea is to breach vulnerable legitimate sites and use them to host web skimmer code, thereby leveraging the good reputation of the genuine domains to their advantage. [more]

D-DAY – June 6, 1944

"They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate." --Franklin D. Roosevelt

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