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https://insightcrime.org/news/historic-case-highlights-us-crackdown-latam-money-launderers/

For the first time, a US bank has admitted to helping criminal networks in Colombia launder hundreds of millions of dollars in dirty money, highlighting the fruits of a renewed push to target those aiding the region’s money launderers.

TD Bank, N.A. and TD Bank USA, N.A. pleaded guilty to a money laundering conspiracy and violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), resulting in a record $1.8 billion penalty but no high-level arrests, the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced October 10.

For nearly a decade, the bank failed to update its anti-money laundering system to detect suspicious transactions and ignored repeated warnings about these deficiencies. During this time, the bank did not monitor more than $18 trillion in activity, which allowed three Colombian criminal networks to launder more than $600 million in illicit proceeds, according to court documents.

“TD Bank’s chronic failures provided fertile ground for a host of illicit activity to penetrate our financial system,” said Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo. “We are making clear that financial institutions will face severe repercussions if they fail to maintain necessary safeguards.”

Prosecutors said high-level officials working on the bank’s global anti-money laundering operations, senior executives, and others from the bank’s audit committee were all aware of “long-term, pervasive, and systemic deficiencies” in its anti-money laundering protocols.

Other low-level employees were also implicated. Financial service representatives and retail bankers in Florida and New Jersey, for example, helped one money laundering network open accounts and obtain ATM cards that were used to launder money from the United States to Colombia via large cash withdrawals. The employees even helped sidestep internal controls and roadblocks in exchange for bribes, according to court records.

“We have taken full responsibility for the failures of our US AML [anti-money laundering] program and are making the investments, changes, and enhancements required to deliver on our commitments,” said Bharat Masrani, Group President and Chief Executive Officer at TD Bank Group.

InSight Crime Analysis

The historic admission from the 10th largest bank in the United States is just the latest part of what appears to be an increased focus from the US government to go after not just money launderers, but the financial institutions that make their illicit activity possible.

“One of the main reasons that we have the Bank Secrecy Act is because it can be very difficult to prove that a bank or its employees knowingly accepted dirty or suspicious money and moved it through their channels,” Scott Greytak, the advocacy director for Transparency International’s US office, told InSight Crime.

TD Bank is not the only US financial institution to come under fire for helping criminal networks launder their illicit proceeds. In 2012, HSBC Bank and several subsidiaries forfeited more than $1 billion after failing to adequately monitor hundreds of billions of dollars in wire transfers in countries like Mexico. More recently, Wells Fargo was penalized in 2022 and 2024 for failing to report dubious transactions and having insufficient internal anti-money laundering controls.

However, TD Bank is the first US bank to plead guilty to money laundering charges and admit its employees knowingly accepted dirty money and moved it through the institution.

The historic plea agreement comes as the United States is implementing new anti-money laundering measures. At the start of this year, a regulation known as the beneficial ownership rule went into effect, which aims to improve oversight of shell companies by requiring all US companies to report the true owner of the corporation and who controls its resources.

In the case of TD Bank, some of the individuals implicated used anonymous shell companies to set up fake accounts with the bank and launder millions of dollars. Had the beneficial ownership requirements already been in place, Greytak said law enforcement could have looked into those suspicious transactions and identified the true owners of the front companies.

With the new rule, criminal groups either have to “break the law by not reporting who actually owns the company, which is a crime, or report that information and lose the disguise provided by such front companies,” he added. “Fortunately, now law enforcement will be able to pierce that corporate veil and know who is behind the operation.”

While the plea agreement with TD Bank is a historic first, the scarcity of these pleas and successful cases is a stark reminder of the continued lack of funding and institutional support for in-depth financial investigations.

“Even when it comes to the foundational element of our anti-money laundering framework, the banks themselves, who are at the heart of the origin story of these laws, that framework is only effective if you have adequate funding and enforcement capacity for the federal government and law enforcement to go after those who fail to comply with it,” said Greytak.