The AML Brief

Financial crimes intelligence for AML, KYC, and fraud professionals.

SARs

Jul 23, 2026

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7 min read

How to Write a SAR Narrative: What to Include and What to Cut

What to include in a SAR narrative, the six elements examiners check, and a full annotated example of what complete and sufficient actually looks like.

Jul 21, 2026

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4 min read

Western Union's fraud victim fund reopened this June. The $586 million case explains why it never really closed.

Compliance flagged the high-fraud agents years before DOJ did. They just didn't have the authority to stop them.

Jul 14, 2026

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5 min read

Danske Bank's Estonia branch moved €200 billion. Its U.S. correspondent banks were told the AML program was fine.

A whistleblower put it in writing to the board in 2014. The suspicious volume kept flowing for two more years.

Jul 7, 2026

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6 min read

Goldman Sachs earned $600 million on three bond deals for a fund that lost $4.5 billion to fraud.

Two senior bankers circumvented Goldman's own internal controls to win the business. The fee alone should have stopped it.

Jun 30, 2026

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6 min read

Deutsche Bank's compliance team identified the mirror trading risk. $10 billion moved anyway.

The mirror trade looks like a normal equity transaction until you see who's on both sides. By the time regulators looked, it was $10 billion and four years later.

Jun 23, 2026

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6 min read

Transaction monitoring watches payments. Trade-based laundering hides in the documents.

FATF calls it one of the three main methods globally. The enforcement record barely mentions it. That's not because it's rare.