AMLA’s direct-supervision criteria may miss smaller high-risk banks, EMIs, PSPs and acquirers that enable cross-border fraud despite not meeting size or six-Member-State thresholds
EFRI has received a fabricated identification document naming a supposed financial crime investigator and falsely claiming that its holder has access to government registries. The document is fake and was not issued or authorised by EFRI.
BaFin Warns About Virtual IBANs – But the Problem is Years Old On 27 July 2026, the German financial supervisor BaFin warned that virtual IBANs can become “Trojan horses” in the European payment system. According to BaFin, layered vIBAN structures may be systematically misused for money laundering and digital underground
Hamblin v Moorwand: Why Victims Cannot Fight Alone The Court of Appeal’s decision in Hamblin v Moorwand exposes a wider failure in fraud recovery. Victims are expected to prove what happened inside financial institutions without access to the relevant records, while the cost of obtaining justice can exceed the fraud
Wise Was Denied a Bank Charter. Will DNB License Qivalis? On 21 July 2026, the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has rejected Wise’s application to establish a national trust bank recently. The decision should attract attention far beyond the United States. The OCC did not treat Wise’s
US and EU Asset Recovery is Failing Fraud Victims Authorities routinely celebrate their successes in tracing, freezing and confiscating criminal assets. Yet the crucial final step — returning those assets to the victims — remains fragmented, discretionary and painfully slow. Current cryptocurrency forfeiture proceedings in the United States expose the
Payment Fraud: Britain’s Bank-Refund Rule Works The first independent evaluation of the UK’s mandatory payment fraud reimbursement scheme is in and it validates the case EFRI has made for years. Forcing banks to refund scam victims cut authorised push payment (APP) fraud on the covered rails by around a fifth,
StablR admitted that EURR and USDR were no longer fully backed after unauthorised access to its platform. The incident raises fundamental questions about minting controls, redemption rights, Payvision-linked management and the MFSA’s supervision.
Days before the MiCA transition ended, Malta authorised an OpenPayd company to provide crypto services across Europe. The controlling owner and the warning signs were public. The MFSA’s assessment was not.
Malta’s Financial Arbiter repeatedly found that OpenPayd improperly credited payments through opaque vIBAN structures. He referred the breaches to the regulator—then denied compensation and blamed the victims’ “greed and gross negligence
