On October 19, 2023, FinCEN announced a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) that identifies international Convertible Virtual Currency Mixing (CVC mixing) as a class of transactions of primary money laundering concern. The NPRM highlights the risks posed by the extensive use of CVC mixing services by a variety of illicit actors throughout the world and proposes a rule to increase transparency around CVC mixing to combat its use by malicious actors including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). 

On October 19, 2023, the Federal Reserve Board issued an enforcement action and fined Metropolitan Commercial Bank, of New York, New York, approximately $14.5 million for violations of customer identification rules and for deficient third-party risk management practices relating to the bank's issuance of prepaid card accounts. The Board conducted an investigation of MCB’s issuance of general purpose reloadable prepaid cards with MovoCash, Inc.,  a former third-party program manager for MCB’s Global Payments Group, that identified deficiencies in the Bank’s third-party risk management and compliance with the Customer Identification Program under BSA.

On September 29, 2023, the Department of the Treasury published through the Federal Register a Notice of information collection, that the Agency will submit to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review and clearance in accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (PRA). The request for information is in relation to the BOIR Form. The public is invited to submit comments on this information collection request on or before October 30, 2023.

On September 28, 2023, FinCEN published through the Federal Register Notice of Proposed Rulemaking which seeks to amend the beneficial ownership information (BOI) reporting rule to extend the deadline to file initial BOI reports for entities created or registered on or after the rule's effective date of January 1, 2024, and before January 1, 2025. While this rule likely won't affect financial institutions directly, it will have a direct impact on business entity customers.

On September 15, 2023, FinCEN assessed a $15 million civil money penalty against Bancrédito International Bank and Trust Corporation (Bancrédito) for willful violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and its implementing regulations. This is FinCEN’s first enforcement action against a Puerto Rican International Banking Entity (IBE), and includes the first violation for failure to implement and maintain an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) program also known as the “Gap Rule.”

On September 8, 2023, FinCEN issued an alert to highlight a prominent virtual currency investment scam known as “pig butchering.”  According to FinCEN’s press release, multiple U.S. law enforcement sources estimate victims in the United States have lost billions of dollars to these scams and other virtual currency investment frauds. 

On August 4, 2023, FinCEN announced that officials from FinCEN traveled to Mexico City to reinforce its continuing commitment to close collaboration with the Mexican government to combat illicit finance. On August 2, FinCEN hosted a cross-border roundtable on the shared priorities of combating fentanyl and other drug trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other predicate crimes. The dialogue was participated by U.S. and Mexican financial institutions, U.S. and Mexican regulators and financial intelligence units, and U.S. law enforcement.

FinCEN has updated its “SAR Filings by Industry” webpage to include data from 2022. In addition to this webpage, FinCEN has an interactive map and and Interactive SAR Stats which allow BSA professionals to analyze what types of suspicious activity are being reported in their areas. As this data allows specific sorting of the data, BSA professionals are able to sort by many different fields including primary regulator, county, industry, etc.