Human Smuggling, Romance Scams, and “Other” Top Fraud

Date Recorded: April 12, 2023
Presented By: Mark Dever, CAMS, AAP, Director, FORVIS, LLP

On January 13, 2023, FinCEN issued an alert to better support financial institutions in detecting financial activity related to human smuggling along the southwest border of the United States. The alert provides trends, typologies, and red flag indicators to help financial institutions better identify and report suspicious transactions potentially related to such activity. On February 23, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission issued a consumer alert recapping and summarizing the millions of reports the Commission received in 2022 about fraud, scams, and bad business practices. Human smuggling and fraud are two of eight “Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism National Priorities” identified by FinCEN pursuant to the Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA) of 2020. This two-hour webinar will update members of the compliance and sales communities on the challenges when looking for and, more importantly, reporting both human smuggling and fraud. This webinar will study the typologies and “red-flags” that could indicate the presence of human smuggling and/or fraud.

Here’s What You’ll Learn:

• Understanding “how” human smuggling works
• Discuss the differences and similarities between human smuggling and human trafficking
• Identify the newest typologies and the newest financial and behavioral indicators that could indicate human smuggling
• Analyze the FTC’s 2022 fraud data
• Highlight Romance Scammers’ “favorite lies”
• Identify FTC tools to help protect consumer clients
• Discuss the proper filing of the SAR to report both human smuggling and fraud
• Allow questions from participants.

Recent well-publicized BSA enforcement actions, fines, and deferred prosecution agreements continue to support a climate proving BSA compliance remains of paramount importance to all financial institutions. This two-hour webinar will provide the compliance and sales staffs with a current “snapshot” of the challenges and requirements presented when detecting and reporting both human smuggling and fraud.