Tag: banks

Jury Convicts Chinese National in $2M Scheme Targeting Elderly Bank Customers

A federal jury has convicted a Chinese national of using his role as a bank employee to access confidential client information to target elderly customers and create a scheme to steal their money and then use it for his personal benefit.

After a five-day trial in front of U.S. District Judge J. Philip Calabrese, Yue Cao, 36, was found guilty on 10 counts of bank fraud, four counts of aggravated identity theft, and one count of money laundering.

Court documents and evidence presented before the jury showed that Cao was a quant analytics manager at an Ohio-based bank who was hired to help protect customers from fraud. 

Instead, from about 2022 to 2023, he used his access to steal the identities and money of elderly customers who had not enrolled in the bank’s online services. 

He did this by first using an offshore service to create email addresses in the names of more than 100 victims. 

Then, he used these emails to enroll the victims in online banking—all without their knowledge or authorization. Additionally, Cao directed the victims’ bank statements and other notifications to the email addresses he created. Because he controlled their online banking, he transferred the victims’ money directly to his personal bank and credit card accounts.

He also used the victims’ identities to open accounts in their names without their knowledge and transferred their money into them. Some of these were brokerage accounts, where he then engaged in options trading using their money. He even arranged trades between the unauthorized accounts he set up and his own brokerage account.

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$1.2 Billion Suspicious Epstein Transactions? Wyden Demands Investigation After JP Morgan Failed To Report For Years

Now that we’re making progress on Epstein – after President Trump and Mike Johnson were forced to cave under overwhelming pressure for DOJ disclosure – a logical next step is to look into who was funding the notorious sex-trafficker. 

On Thursday morning, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) called for an investigation into whether JPMorgan Chase deliberately concealed suspicious transactions by Epstein. 

You really just need to look at Exhibit A in Wyden’s memo (dated Wednesday) based on unsealed court records: the number of transactions flagged as suspicious between 2002 – 2016, vs. a flurry of almost $1.3 billion in suspicious transactions that the bank scrambled to file right after Epstein died in jail awaiting trial. 

Wyden writes: 

The unsealed court records include copies of SARs that JPMC filed on Epstein’s accounts between 2002 and 2019. Between 2002 and 2016, JPMC filed 7 SARs flagging only $4.3 million in suspicious transactions from Epstein’s accounts.¹ Only after Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges did JPMC report the full extent of Epstein’s suspicious financial activity. In August and September of 2019, JPMC filed two SARs flagging more than 5,000 suspicious wire transfers moving approximately $1.3 billion in and out of Epstein’s accounts.² This is the strongest evidence yet that JPMC should face an investigation for failure to appropriately monitor and report Epstein’s financial activity.

According to internal bank emails, JPMorgan may have held off on filing the SARs (suspicious activity reports) because it wanted “to continue working with Epstein,” who was a great source of referrals despite firing him as a client in 2013, the report found.

The bank said in late October that “it was flagging about 4,700 transactions, totaling more than $1 billion, because they were potentially related to reports of human trafficking involving Mr. Epstein. It also mentioned Mr. Epstein’s wire transfers to Russian banks and sensitivities around “his relationships with two U.S. presidents.” Mr. Epstein at times was close with President Trump and former President Bill Clinton,” according to the NYT.

Wyden said in a statement that it was “clear that JPMorgan Chase ought to face criminal investigation for the way it enabled Epstein’s horrific crimes,” and that both Congress and the DOJ should investigate the bank – which has repeatedly issued statements of regret for working with Epstein, and claims it did all it could with the information it had at the time.

“The second the government finally made public the sex trafficking details in 2019 — information they clearly had for years — we identified for law enforcement a range of Epstein’s past transactions intended to assist with the investigation,” said bank spokeswoman Patricia Wexler on Thursday. 

Will Wyden actually follow the money?

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Here’s Something the Media Is Trying to Keep Quiet About Goldman Sachs’ Top Attorney Who Just Resigned

Kathy Ruemmler, Goldman Sachs’ top attorney, is leaving due to her ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the late New York financier and convicted child predator, who was found dead in his cell in August 2019. Numerous files and communications related to this man have been released. This development is unwelcome, especially to Democrats, who were hoping to find incriminating evidence to use against Donald Trump. However, these emails have mostly cast Democrats and their allies in a negative light, with Ruemmler being the latest example.   

She’s not just a top Goldman attorney; she was Obama’s White House counsel, something that the media is either ignoring or whispering at the last moment. The narrative defending Ms. Ruemmler was that her relationship with Epstein was professional. The new text and emails suggested something else.

Goldman Sachs’s top lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, resigned on Thursday in the wake of the Justice Department’s release of emails and other material that revealed her extensive relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier. 

Ms. Ruemmler and representatives for Goldman said for years that she had a strictly professional relationship with Mr. Epstein, a convicted sex offender. But emails, text messages and photographs released late last month upended that narrative, leading to Ms. Ruemmler’s sudden resignation, which surprised many at the firm. 

Before joining Goldman in 2020, Ms. Ruemmler was a counselor, confidante and friend to Mr. Epstein, the documents showed. She advised him on how to respond to tough questions about his sex crimes, discussed her dating life, advised him on how to avoid unflattering media scrutiny and addressed him as “sweetie” and “Uncle Jeffrey.” 

Mr. Epstein, in turn, provided career advice on her move to Goldman, introduced her to well-known businesspeople and showered her with gifts of spa treatments, high-end travel and Hermès luxury items. In total, Ms. Ruemmler was mentioned in more than 10,000 of the documents released by the Justice Department. 

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Why JPMorgan paid off Jeffrey Epstein after 2008 financial crisis

The 2007 implosion of two Bear Stearns hedge funds that invested in risky mortgage bonds led to the wider crash of the financial system, and as it turns out years later, a fairly sizable and eyebrow raising settlement paid by mega bank JPMorgan to the convicted pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The hedge funds went belly-up in the summer of 2007, the first public casualty of the smoldering financial crisis that would take down Bear, then Lehman Brothers, and were it not for a government bailout, the entire financial system in 2008.

After Bear’s collapse, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, at the insistence of the government, took over the firm, its assets and many of its liabilities, including claims by investors that they were misled about the financial condition of the hedge funds before their collapse.

Epstein was one of those investors, placing more than $57 million of his cash into something called the “Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage hedge fund,” On the Money has learned. 

Yes, the fund’s name was a mouthful and should have served as a warning signal to anyone who wanted to invest in it. So it’s a logical question why JPM needed to settle with the creep?

A JPM spokesman had no comment, so we can only speculate. Meanwhile, Epstein’s ties to the hedge funds were buried in the recent New York Times opus about JPMorgan’s long banking relationship with the sexual predator. 

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China calls on banks to limit exposure to US debt – Bloomberg

China has urged its banks to curb their exposure to US government debt, citing market volatility and growing financial and geopolitical risks, Bloomberg has reported citing people familiar with the matter.

Over the past decade, China has steadily trimmed its US Treasury holdings, a shift that has seen it overtaken by Japan and the UK as the largest foreign holders of American debt. Since peaking at around $1.3 trillion in 2013, its holdings have fallen roughly by half to about $650–700 billion, reaching levels not seen since 2008.

Beijing has advised China’s major financial institutions to limit new purchases of US government bonds and reduce positions where exposure is high, according to sources who spoke to the outlet on Monday. The guidance reportedly does not apply to Beijingss’s official state holdings.

According to the report, which cited China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange, Chinese banks held about $298 billion in dollar-denominated bonds as of September. It is unclear how much of that total consisted of US Treasuries.

The guidance, reportedly intended to diversify market risk, came ahead of last week’s phone call between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart, Donald Trump. In October, the two leaders agreed to a one-year trade truce, under which tariffs and export controls on each other’s goods would be lowered.

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Buried in DOJ Files: Epstein Was a Fixer for Rothschild Banking Dynasty

By the summer of 2016, Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t just a well-heeled fixture working the back rooms in the corridors of power—he was a screaming red flag, a multiple convicted sex offender whose dodgy 2008 plea deal for procuring underage girls had already damaged his brand across elite political and financial circles. But not all elite circles. In fact, he was still a go-to partner for the very highest echelons of global power. While digging deeper into the voluminous Epstein Files, a stunning email emerged— to one of Europe’s most formidable bankers, Ariane de Rothschild, the steely head of the Edmond de Rothschild Group. Jeffrey was laying out fiduciary advice as if he were her personal oracle. This correspondence wasn’t the sterile back-and-forth of distant professionals. Rather, it was more like old confidants navigating a epic storm together.

On July 20, 2016, Epstein fired off a link to an article about the erupting 1MDB scandal in Malaysia, where billions had been siphoned from the sovereign wealth fund into a vortex of luxury yachts, Hollywood films, and shadowy international bank accounts. He didn’t just share the news—he provided her with a link to a New York Times article about the 1MDB scandal, before dispensing advice, warning her how American prosecutors might scrutinise her every move in relation to this massive scandal.

Ariane, typing from Luxembourg amid a tense board meeting with lawyers, shot back with raw urgency: “If I don’t go, I die. What do DOJ guys prefer?”(EFTA02456252). It was the cry of a woman cornered, turning not to her army of high-priced attorneys but to a man whose own history reeked of exploitation and evasion.

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Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer accepted gifts from ‘Uncle Jeffrey’ Epstein, documents show

Goldman Sachs’ (GS.N), opens new tab top lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler accepted gifts from late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and advised him on how to address press inquiries regarding his crimes, according to a Reuters review of emails among millions of documents the U.S. Department of Justice released last week.

Ruemmler, who was also White House counsel during the Obama administration, referred to Epstein in emails as “Uncle Jeffrey” and received gifts from him including wine and a handbag, the documents show.

Ruemmler had a large number of communications with Epstein from 2014 to 2019, even after the disgraced financier’s 2008 guilty plea for procuring a person under the age of 18 for prostitution, the documents showed.

These communications included advising Epstein on how to respond to a media query in 2019 concerning the alleged special legal treatment he received because of his connections, the emails show.

“I was a defense attorney when I dealt with Jeffrey Epstein,” Ruemmler said in a statement on Tuesday. “I got to know him as a lawyer and that was the foundation of my relationship with him.

“I had no knowledge of any ongoing criminal conduct on his part, and I did not know him as the monster he has been revealed to be,” she continued. “These decade-old private emails you are selectively referencing and pruriently reporting on have nothing to do with my work at Goldman Sachs.”

Goldman spokesperson Tony Fratto said in an email that Epstein often offered unsolicited favors and gifts to many business contacts.

Goldman has backed Ruemmler in the past, with CEO David Solomon calling her “an excellent general counsel.”

Fratto has said Goldman understood the nature of Ruemmler’s prior job as a white-collar defense lawyer, and was satisfied after conducting its own diligence.

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Credit Suisse had many more bank accounts with Nazi ties than previously known, investigation finds

The financial services company Credit Suisse had hundreds more bank accounts with Nazi ties than it had previously revealed, a new investigation reported this week.

The findings were discovered during an audit by independent investigators of UBS, the Swiss bank that acquired Credit Suisse in 2023.

“What the investigation has found to date shows that Credit Suisse’s involvement was more extensive than was previously known, and it underscores the importance of continuing to engage in research efforts about this horrific era of modern history,” Neil Barofsky, a lawyer overseeing the inquiry, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Barofsky’s report found 890 accounts potentially linked to Nazis: 628 individuals and 262 legal entities.

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Rape allegation against ex-Barclays CEO Jes Staley was raised in US Epstein investigation

US prosecutors reviewed allegations of rape and bodily harm against the former Barclays boss and former JP Morgan banker Jes Staley, according to newly unsealed files linked to the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Multiple documents in the Epstein files cite serious allegations of sexual misconduct against Staley, including that he forced a woman to touch his genitals during a massage before raping her, and left “bloody marks” on the arms of a woman he called “tinkerbell”.

The bulk of the allegations are revealed in what appears to be a confidential 86-page internal memo produced by prosecutors and addressed to Geoffrey S Berman, then US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The memo, titled “Investigation into Potential Co-Conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein” and dated 19 December 2019, summarised interviews with victims, witnesses and subjects of its investigation.

There is no evidence that prosecutors decided to pursue the allegations. Staley, who has previously denied any wrongdoing, did not respond to requests for comment made over several months, either directly or via his lawyers. He has never been charged with a crime related to the allegations.

During a UK court hearing in 2025, Staley admitted to having sex with a member of Epstein’s staff in New York, but agreed with a lawyer during cross-examination that he would describe the intercourse as “consensual”.

The memo refers to one woman’s recollection of events that allegedly occurred “in or around 2011 or 2012”. It says: “Epstein instructed [redacted] to provide a massage to Jes Staley in Epstein’s New York residence. [Redacted] attempted to give him an ordinary massage, but he forced [redacted] to touch his genitals and then raped [redacted].

“Afterwards, [redacted] complained to Epstein, who said he left it to [redacted] and Staley to decide whether to engage in sex. After this incident, [redacted] began to distance herself from Epstein.”

This allegation was included in a section labelled: “Interviews of Victims Who Were Abused As Adults”.

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Wells Fargo denies $28K refund after check altered, cashed by mail thieves

When it’s time to pay a bill, many people still write a check and mail it. But is that safe anymore? Postal inspectors say mail theft is rising fast — and thieves are going after your checks.

The phrase “the check is in the mail” has new meaning for two northern California homeowners who were among the latest to pay the price of mail theft. They dropped their property tax payments in the mail as usual. And the checks were cashed right away — but not by the tax collector.

Kathy Pham of San Jose was surprised to get a delinquency notice in the mail saying she never paid her property taxes.

She thought, sure she did.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. Did I forget?’ I was like kicking myself,” Pham said. “My husband actually took the check down to the post office and dropped it off.”

In fact, her bank statement showed that the check had cleared months ago.

“I said I’m going to go to the county Monday, and I’m going to tell them, ‘Hey, you cashed my check.’ And then my husband said, ‘Hey, let’s look at the check.’ And that’s when I almost fell over,” she said.

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