When Congress rolled out the Paycheck Protection Program in the early, chaotic days of the pandemic, the intent was simple: get cash to struggling American businesses fast enough to keep people on payrolls. What it wasn’t designed for was multinational auto parts suppliers backed by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Match Group, the company behind Match.com, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, The League, and other dating platforms, will pay $14 million and make sweeping changes to its business practices to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it misled consumers and made it unnecessarily difficult to cancel subscriptions.
The European Banking Authority (EBA) has found that supervisory technology, or SupTech, has the potential to make anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) supervision more efficient, data-driven, and risk-focused across the EU, but warns that adoption is still in its early stages and not without challenges.
For years, Rent4Keeps and one of its biggest franchisees, Darranda, made their money by selling essential household goods to people who could least afford them and charging them eye-watering sums along the way.
The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) has reached a $48.5 million settlement with Paxos Trust Company over systemic anti-money laundering (AML) deficiencies and failures to adequately vet its former business partner, Binance. The agreement, announced by Superintendent Adrienne A. Harris on August 7, requires Paxos to pay a $26.5 million penalty to the state and commit an additional $22 million to bolstering its compliance program under a DFS-approved remediation plan.
Two major lead generation companies, Assurance IQ and MediaAlpha, have recently agreed to pay a combined $145 million to settle Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges that they misled millions of consumers seeking comprehensive health insurance and exposed them to a barrage of telemarketing calls and robocalls. The settlements, announced August 7, come in the form of two separate stipulated court orders that will also impose long-term bans on misleading health insurance marketing tactics.
FINTRAC doesn’t want to play the villain in your compliance story. That’s the unmistakable message behind Canada’s financial intelligence agency’s newly updated policy on administrative monetary penalties (AMPs). While penalties are still on the table, some of them quite hefty, the focus is firmly on education, behavioral change, and long-term compliance rather than finger-wagging or financial punishment.