ACAMS Northern California Chapter December Virtual Event: Financial Crime Case Studies!

Join us for our year-end Learning event where we will once again be joined by the talented students at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). A selection of MIIS graduate students will be presenting actual unique cyber and financial crime case studies, diving into how money laundering occurs, and what new tools and techniques bad actors are adopting.

We are looking forward to our final Learning Event of 2021! Please join us for a few riveting case studies shared by five MIIS students!

Grace Borges: The Fraudulent Life of a Real Housewife 
Should we be surprised that one of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City was charged with financial fraud and money laundering this year? This case study looks at the various facets of her schemes, from voice phishing to fake online businesses to structuring.

Noah Aimar: The Easiest $1.3bn Ever Made: Control-Finance Limited’s Vanishing Act
A U.K. registered, private limited company set up and owned by a single person executed a Ponzi scheme that lasted a mere five months before going completely dark. Through the clever use of social media, paid actors, and disincentives for customer withdrawals they were able to make off with what today is the equivalent of $1.28 billion. 

Naomi Lyles: The Banana Fund Fraud
The “Banana Fund” was a crowd-funding concept that promised investors as much as a 20-fold return on initial Bitcoin investments. The creator then laundered and traded these investments for immense personal financial gain before announcing to investors that the project had failed. Blockchain analytics enabled investigators to see what the fraudster really did with the money. 

Myles Flores: The BitcoinFog Case: The Malicious Side of Mixers
How did a Russian-Swedish citizen create a mixing service to launder more than 1.2 million Bitcoin from Darknet Market vendors? And how did investigators eventually catch up with him? 

Alli Munro: Centra Tech Scam
The crypto world is fraught with misconceptions and misunderstood jargon. However, one simple fact may hold true: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. This is the story of how Sohrab (Sam) Sharma, Robert Farkas, and Raymond Trapani fraudulently raised over $25 million in the crypto space with their company Centra Tech