Foreign Scammers Use U.S. Banks to Fleece Americans

Summary

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Reporting Highlights Struggling Gatekeepers: In the face of some $44 billion a year in pig-butchering scams conducted by Asian crime syndicates, U.S. banks have failed to prevent mass scale money laundering. Black Market Bank Accounts: Chinese-language Telegram channels offer to rent U.S. bank accounts to pig-butchering scammers, who use the accounts to move victims’ cash into crypto. One Address, 176 Clients: Bank of America allowed hundreds of unverified customers to open accounts, prosecutors alleged, including 176 who claimed the same small home as their address. These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story. Brian Maloney Jr. was flummoxed when he was served with a lawsuit against his family’s business, Middlesex Truck and Coach, in January. Maloney and his father, also named Brian, run the operation, located in Boston, which boasts that it can repair anything “from two axles to ten.” A burly man in his mid-50s who wears short-sleeved polo shirts emblazoned with the company name, Maloney Jr. has been around his dad’s shop since he was 8. The garage briefly surfaced in the media in 2012 when then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a campaign stop there and the Boston Herald featured Maloney Sr. talking about how he had built the business from nothing in a neighborhood he described as having been a “war zone.” Now Middlesex was being sued by a New Jersey man who claimed he had been defrauded of $133,565 in a cryptocurrency scheme. The suit claimed Middlesex “controlled and maintained” a bank account at Chase that had been used to collect the fraudulent payment. The purported victim wanted his money back. None of this made any sense to Maloney Jr. His company did not have an account at Chase, and he barely knew what crypto was. “For God’s sake, we fix trucks and still have AOL,” he wou...