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Hello! It’s May 24, and we’re tracking today’s top stories: China’s fentanyl-for-crypto bazaar, Syria’s Assad returns to global stage, Russia’s dystopian cyber gulag, 10 key compliance mistakes you might be making, and much more.

Featured Story

🎯Chinese Labs Are Selling Fentanyl Ingredients for Millions in Crypto. Researchers at Elliptic found more than 90 Chinese chemical companies that sold fentanyl “precursor” chemicals and advertised their products on the open web, fully 90 percent of which offered to accept payment in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Tether. [more]

Top Stories

🔸Bloody red carpet: Assad returns to international stage with Arab League welcome. The Biden administration and top White House officials have condemned the move, vowing to continue its policy of keeping Syria an international pariah. [more]

🔸The Cyber Gulag: How Russia tracks, censors and controls its citizens. Authorities pressured companies like Google, Apple and Facebook to store user data on Russian servers, to no avail, and announced plans to build a “sovereign internet” that could be cut off from the rest of the world. [more]

🔸These 10 Compliance Mistakes Are Making Regulators Jumpy - Here's Your Lifeline [more]

🔸Crypto sector gets its first set of global rules from watchdog. The industry, which typically only has to comply with anti-money laundering checks, has been calling for a global approach to regulation as different jurisdictions follow their own rules. [more]

🔸US lawmaker demands action against Chinese chip firm CXMT after Micron. Representative Mike Gallagher, an influential lawmaker whose select committee on China has pressed the Biden administration to take tougher stances on China, is the only lawmaker so far to call for retaliatory action. [more]

🔸Emails, Chat Logs, Code and a Notebook: The Mountain of FTX Evidence. For months, federal prosecutors building the criminal case against the fallen cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried have assembled a vast and unusually varied array of evidence. [more]

🔸DOE won’t award $200M to battery company criticized by GOP over China links. Microvast is a publicly traded U.S. company but has a subsidiary in China, a connection that Republicans have used to further their allegations that Biden’s climate and clean energy spending will benefit Beijing. [more]

🔸US sanctions North Korean entities involved in cyberattacks and IT worker fraud. The U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday announced new sanctions on four entities that employ thousands of North Korean IT workers who help illicitly finance the regime's missile and weapons of mass destruction programs. [more]

🔸Binance Blasts 'Desperate' Reuters Report It Commingled Customer and Company Funds. The report, citing unnamed "former insiders," said the funds in question "ran into billions of dollars" and that "commingling happened almost daily" in accounts the exchange had at collapsed U.S. lender Silvergate Bank. [more]

🔸New Jersey man sentenced to 12 years for scouting U.S. landmarks for terror attacks. Court documents show Saab was ordered by Hezbollah to open a front company to obtain fertilizer for explosives. He is also accused of conducting surveillance in Istanbul and Turkey. [more]

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IN THE NEWS

Russia

🔸Kremlin gas profits plunge as tide turns in Putin’s energy war. Gazprom has announced that its profit for 2022 plunged by more than 40% and said it would not pay a full-year dividend. [more]

🔸Russia’s sanctioned interior minister visits Saudi Arabia just after trip by Ukraine’s Zelenskyy. The visits underline how the kingdom and Gulf Arab states, traditionally the security clients of the United States, have been maintaining their relations with Moscow amid the Ukraine war. [more]

🔸Pro-Putin Party Fields 100 Ukraine War Participants for Office. Fifty-one of the 101 candidates in the United Russia party’s primaries are combat veterans, 28 of whom are currently on the battlefield. [more]

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China

🔸Jilin Jinguan electric to build road between Iran and Russia for new energy facilities. The company plans to build 70 optical storage and charging stations worth 1.4 billion yuan and 3,400 charging facilities worth 68 billion yuan ($9.8 billion). [more]

🔸China presses Dutch minister for access to chipmaking tech blocked on security grounds. There was no indication the Netherlands changed its restriction on the supply of lithography machines available only from a single Dutch company that use ultraviolet light to etch tiny circuits on next-generation processor chips. [more]

🔸Chinese hackers attacked Kenyan government as debt strains grew. Chinese hackers targeted Kenya's government in a widespread, years-long series of digital intrusions against key ministries and state institutions. [more]

Crypto & Cyber

🔸Interview With a Crypto Scam Investment Spammer. Asked whether they felt at all conflicted about spamming people with invitations to cryptocurrency scams, Quotpw said in their hometown “they pay more for such work than in ‘white’ jobs” — referring to legitimate programming jobs that don’t involve malware, botnets, spams and scams. [more]

🔸CBDCs on the horizon: The current state of CBDC initiatives around the world. Central bank digital currencies gain traction as countries worldwide engage in their development despite skepticism from the crypto community. [more]

🔸Biden picks Air Force general to lead NSA and Cyber Command. Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, who has served for years in senior US military cyber positions, is Biden’s choice to replace outgoing Army Gen. Paul Nakasone. [more]

🔸Suspected Iranian hackers target Israeli shipping and logistics companies. The hacking campaign targeted at least eight Israeli websites — including shipping company SNY Cargo, logistics firm Depolog and restaurant equipment supplier SZM — with a watering hole attack. [more]

Corruption & Financial Crime

🔸SEC Accuses ‘Depressed With Money’ Rapper of Running $60M Pot-Based Ponzi Scheme. The musician claims on his website that he wants to show young people how to be successful: "BigRigBaby wants to be known as a person who keeps it real and shows young people they can make a difference in their community." [more]

🔸India's Adani stocks rally after SEBI probe draws a blank on foreign links. The rally has led one of the group companies, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, to briefly recoup all its market capitalization losses since a damaging report by the U.S. short seller Hindenburg Research on Jan. 24. [more]

🔸New Justice Department-led task force pledges global crackdown on illegal timber trade. The working group, dubbed TIMBER (Timber Interdiction Membership Board and Enforcement Resource), brings together several government departments — Justice, Agriculture, Interior and Homeland Security — and the U.S. Council on Transnational Organized Crime’s Strategic Division. [more]

🔸Federal Reserve Board announces termination of enforcement action with The Bank of Nova Scotia. U.S. regulators told Scotiabank to beef up its corporate governance and oversight to ensure that its anti-money-laundering controls are compliant with U.S. federal and state laws. [more]

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." --Edmund Burke

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