Latest news with #moneyLaundering
Malay Mail
15 hours ago
- Business
- Malay Mail
MACC freezes RM758m assets linked to Daim's widow, family in UK
PETALING JAYA, June 3 — The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has reportedly obtained a court order to freeze £132 million (RM758.2 million) worth of assets belonging to Toh Puan Na'imah Abdul Khalid, the widow of the late Tun Daim Zainuddin, and her family in the United Kingdom. According to a report in New Straits Times the order was granted by Kuala Lumpur High Court judge Justice Azhar Abdul Hamid in an ex-parte proceeding today. The frozen assets were said to include two commercial buildings valued at £55,200,000, five luxury residences totalling £77,115,000 and a bank account owned by the Ilham Foundation. The order was reportedly issued after the court was satisfied that the assets were linked to suspected offences under Section 4(1) of the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act 2001. Malay Mail has reached out to Na'imah's lawyer Rajesh Nagarajan for a response. In January last year, Daim claimed trial to a charge of failing to comply with a notice to declare his assets, which included several luxury vehicles, companies, and properties across Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Pahang, Negeri Sembilan, Perak, and Kedah. In January 2024, Na'imah, 67, was charged in the Sessions Court with failing to comply with a notice to declare her assets, including Menara Ilham and several other properties in Kuala Lumpur and Penang. After Daim's death on November 13 that same year, the prosecution withdrew the charges and the court granted an order discharging and acquitting him.
Free Malaysia Today
16 hours ago
- Business
- Free Malaysia Today
MACC freezes over RM750mil in assets linked to Daim's wife, family
The Kuala Lumpur High Court has allowed MACC's application to freeze assets worth RM758.2 million belonging to Naimah Khalid and her family. (Bernama pic) PETALING JAYA : The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has obtained a court order to freeze £132 million (RM758.2 million) worth of assets in London belonging to Naimah Khalid, the wife of the late former finance minister Daim Zainuddin, and her family. The assets include two commercial buildings, five luxury residences, and one bank account, Utusan Malaysia reported. Kuala Lumpur High Court judge Justice Azhar Abdul Hamid granted MACC's application to freeze the assets in an ex parte proceeding today. The court order will be sent to UK authorities for enforcement. According to MACC, investigations revealed that the assets were linked to suspected offences under Section 4(1) of the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act 2001. The commission said the freeze was part of ongoing efforts to trace and recover assets believed to be connected to unlawful activity. MACC chief Azam Baki previously said the commission was considering seizing over RM2 billion in undeclared assets linked to Daim, his family, and proxies. Eight new investigation papers were opened after the receipt of fresh information from foreign agencies. In January last year, Daim claimed trial to a charge of failing to comply with the terms of an asset declaration notice issued by MACC. He was accused of not disclosing his ownership of 38 companies, 19 land plots in five states, six properties, two unit trust accounts, and seven luxury cars. MACC said he had asked for five deadline extensions but still failed to comply. Naimah also faces an asset declaration charge. She is accused of failing to declare her ownership in various companies, several plots of land here and in Penang, and two vehicles. After Daim's death on Nov 13 last year, the prosecution withdrew the charges and the court granted an order discharging and acquitting him.
Daily Mail
26-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Sophisticated conman dupes 14 close family friends to shell out £600,000 on fraudulent sports betting scheme and then lavishes the money on himself
A 'sophisticated' conman duped family friends into shelling out £600,000 on a sports betting 'Ponzi scheme' - before lavishing their money on himself. Richard Evans, 41, was jailed for a seven-year scam which saw him convince 14 people they would make huge returns on an elaborate 'spread betting' operation. The victims left out of pocket when the venture went 'catastrophically wrong' included a teacher who lost an inheritance she had been left by her father at the age of 11. Most of the investors were 'lifelong friends' of Evans's parents and struggled to believe someone they had known for years could defraud them, Portsmouth Crown Court heard. Evans, a father-of-two, has now been jailed for four-and-a-half years after pleading guilty to nine counts of fraud and two counts of money laundering. Passing sentencing, Recorder Jaron Crooknorth said Evans should be 'ashamed' of his actions and the impact on the families he defrauded. He said: 'Although money was used to place bets it could not be called investing, there were no true profits, you made annual statements to induce more money. 'I do not accept there was little or no planning, this was sophisticated. 'This took place over a significant period, your actions were dishonest even if it did not start that way.' Evans told his victims they could make money through a 'sophisticated' scheme focused on spread betting, where gamblers bet on if the outcome of a match will be higher or a lower than a potential range of likely scores. The court heard that the investors signed a contract which promised a 15 per cent return on their investment guaranteed by Evans' wealthy business partner. They were told their money would be invested through a company called Sports Trust, which did not exist. But the plan - which began in 2014 - was 'inevitably' going to fail and he was left without the money to repay investors, prosecutors said. He 'frittered away' the money, which went straight into his bank account, on bars and restaurants as well as using it to pay his mortgage. In one family he targeted, both parents and their two adult children invested in the scheme and lost £225,050 between them. One victim, Alison Wem, said she felt she had 'failed as a mother' by recommending the investment option to the rest of her family. In total, 14 people invested £612,807 which has yet to be repaid, the court heard. Evans was said to have made £106,000 in bets with an index company, a gambling firm specialising in spread betting, but was paid out just £52,987 - a loss of almost £53,000. He did make a meagre profit of £300 through Paddy Power, far lower than the amount invested. Evans managed to keep the scheme afloat by making false annual statements to encourage people to keep their money invested and, when that failed, stalling or making excuses about repayments. Eventually, his victims grew suspicious and reported Evans to the police in late 2021. The court was told that the fraud has 'fractured' families, with some standing by Evans. One victim of the scheme even provided a character reference for the father of two. Prosecutor Tim Moores said: 'The fallout that has occurred, even between friends and family, between those who realised they were duped and those who still now refuse to believe Evans defrauded them was relevant to the fact that most people knew him, most of the investors were close family friends of his parents and their adult children.' He added: 'It is not a case where there are expenditures on large capital items, it is just a regular pattern of the defendant using the sums as his own, a lot of it has been frittered away on restaurants and bars.' James Williams, defending, claimed in mitigation that Evans' scheme had been a 'genuine' attempt to enrich himself and his investors. He said: 'They went into this with their eyes wide was an attempt by Evans to make money, largely for himself and for the investors, that went catastrophically wrong.'
Free Malaysia Today
14-05-2025
- Business
- Free Malaysia Today
June hearing for Muhyiddin's bid to transfer criminal case to High Court
Muhyiddin Yassin is charged with abusing his power as prime minister to obtain RM232 million for Bersatu in 2021 and three counts of receiving a total of RM200 million said to be the proceeds of illegal activities. KUALA LUMPUR : The High Court here has set June 11 to hear former prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin's application to transfer the trial of his abuse of power and money laundering charges. His lawyer, Tang Jia Wearn, told sessions court judge Azura Alwi during a mention today that the application would be heard by Justice Jamil Hussin. The Bersatu president filed the application on April 4, arguing that his case involves legal questions of unusual complexity, particularly as regards certain provisions of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission Act 2009. He contends that the questions warrant the holding of the trial before an experienced judge. Meanwhile, deputy public prosecutor Noralis Mat informed the court that the prosecution had submitted a list of witnesses in the money laundering case to the defence team this morning. Azura set July 11 for case management to enable both parties to update the court on the development of the application. Muhyiddin's trial had been set by the sessions court to be heard on 11 days between September this year and January 2026. The prosecution informed the court that it intended to call up to 30 witnesses to testify during the trial. They include investment, trade and industry minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz and tycoon Syed Mokhtar Albukhary. Muhyiddin, 77, was charged in the Kuala Lumpur sessions court with abusing his power as prime minister in connection with the Jana Wibawa programme by seeking to obtain RM232 million for his party, Bersatu, in 2021. The Pagoh MP was also charged with two counts of receiving money from illegal activities, amounting to RM195 million from Bukhary Equity, which was deposited into Bersatu's CIMB Bank account. He was also charged in the Shah Alam sessions court in March 2023 with receiving money from illegal activities amounting to RM5 million. The case was transferred to the sessions court here for a joint trial. This is Muhyiddin's second attempt to have the charges transferred to the High Court. In July 2023, he dropped an earlier bid to pursue another application to have the charges struck out altogether. The High Court subsequently struck out the charges and acquitted Muhyiddin. However, the Court of Appeal reinstated the charges in February last year.
WIRED
13-05-2025
- Business
- WIRED
An $8.4 Billion Chinese Hub for Crypto Crime Is Incorporated in Colorado
May 13, 2025 10:00 AM Before a crackdown by Telegram, Xinbi Guarantee grew into one of the internet's biggest markets for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers and money laundering. And all registered to a US address. Photo-Illustration:As the underground industry of crypto investment scams has grown into one of the world's most lucrative forms of cybercrime, the secondary market of money launderers for those scammers has grown to match it. Amid that black market, one such Chinese-language service on the messaging platform Telegram blossomed into an all-purpose underground bazaar: It has offered not only cashout services to scammers but also money laundering for North Korean hackers, stolen data, targeted harassment-for-hire, and even what appears to be sex trafficking. And somehow, it's all overseen by a company legally registered in the United States. According to new research released today by crypto-tracing firm Elliptic, a company called Xinbi Guarantee has since 2022 facilitated no less than $8.4 billion in transactions via its Telegram-based marketplace prior to Telegram's actions in recent days to remove its accounts from the platform.. Money stolen from scam victims likely represents the 'vast majority' of that sum, according to Elliptic's co-founder Tom Robinson. Yet even as the market serves Chinese-speaking scammers, it also boasts on the top of its website—in Mandarin—that it's registered in Colorado. 'Xinbi Guarantee has served as a giant, purportedly US-incorporated illicit online marketplace for online scams that primarily offers money laundering services,' says Robinson. He adds, though, that Elliptic has also found a remarkable variety of other criminal offerings on the market: child-bearing surrogacy and egg donors, harassment services that offer to threaten or throw feces at any chosen victim, and even sex workers in their teens who are likely trafficking victims. Xinbi Guarantee is the second such crime-friendly Chinese-language market that Robinson and his team of researchers have uncovered over the last year. Last July, they published a report on Huione Guarantee, a similar Cambodia-based service that Elliptic said in January had facilitated $24 billion in transactions—largely from crypto scammers—making it the biggest illicit online marketplace in history by Elliptic's accounting. That market's parent company, Huione Group, was added to a list of known money laundering operations by the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) earlier this month in an attempt to limit its access to US financial institutions. After WIRED reached out to Telegram last week about the illicit activity taking place on Xinbi Guarantee's and Huione Guarantee's channels on its messaging platform, Telegram appears to have responded Monday by banning many of the central channels and administrator accounts used by both Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee. 'Criminal activities like scamming or money laundering are forbidden by Telegram's terms of service and are always removed whenever discovered,' Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn wrote to WIRED in a statement. 'Communities previously reported to us by Wired or included in reports published by Elliptic have all been taken down.' Telegram had already banned several of Huione Guarantee's channels in February, following an earlier Elliptic report on the marketplace, but Huione Guarantee quickly recreated them, and it's not yet clear whether the new removals will prevent the two companies from rebuilding their presence on Telegram again, perhaps with new accounts or even new branding. 'These are very lucrative businesses, and they'll attempt to rebuild in some way,' Robinson said of the two marketplaces following Telegram's latest purge. Elliptic's accounting of the total lifetime revenue of the biggest online black markets. Courtesy of Elliptic Xinbi Guarantee didn't respond to multiple requests for comment on Elliptic's findings that WIRED sent to the market's administrators on Telegram. Like Huione Guarantee, Xinbi Guarantee has offered a similar 'guarantee' model of enabling third-party vendors to offer services by requiring a deposit from them to prevent fraud. Yet it's flown under the radar, even as it grew into one of the biggest hubs for crypto crime on the internet. In terms of sheer scale of transactions prior to Telegram's crackdown, it was second only to Huione's market, according to Elliptic. Both services 'offer a window into the China-based underground banking network,' Robinson says. 'It's another example of these huge Chinese-language 'guaranteed' marketplaces that have thrived for years.' On Xinbi Guarantee, Elliptic found numerous posts from vendors offering to accept funds related to 'quick kills,' 'slow kills,' and 'pig butchering" transactions, all different terms for crypto investment scams and other forms of fraud. In some cases, Robinson explains, these Xinbi Guarantee vendors offer bank accounts in the same country as the victim so that they can receive whatever payment they're tricked into making, then pay the scammer in the cryptocurrency Tether. In other cases, the Xinbi Guarantee merchants offer to receive cryptocurrency payments and cash them out in the scammer's local currency, such as Chinese renminbi. Aside from Xinbi Guarantee's central use as a cash-out point for crypto scammers, Elliptic also found that the market's vendors offered other wares for scammers such as stolen data that could be used for finding victims, as well as services for registering SIM cards and Starlink internet subscriptions through proxies. North Korean state-sponsored cybercriminals also appear to have made use of the platform for money laundering. Elliptic found through blockchain analysis, for instance, that about $220,000 stolen from the Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX—the victim of a $235 million theft in July of last year, widely attributed to North Korean hackers—had flowed into Xinbi Guarantee in a series of transactions last November. Those money laundering and scam-enabling services, however, are far from the only shady offerings found on Xinbi Guarantee's market. Elliptic also found listings for surrogate mothers and egg donors, with one post showing faceless pictures of the donor's body. Other accounts have offered services that will, for a payment in Tether, place a funeral wreath at a target's door, deface their home with graffiti, post damaging statements around their home, have someone verbally threaten them, throw feces at them, or even, most bizarrely, surround their home with AIDS patients. One posting suggested these AIDS patients would carry 'case reports and needles for intimidation." Other listings have offered sex workers as young as 18 years old, noting the specific sex acts that are allowed and forbidden. Elliptic says that one of its researchers was even offered a 14-year-old by a Xinbi Guarantee merchant. (The account holder noted, however, that no transaction for sex with someone below the age of 18 would be guaranteed by Xinbi. The legal age of consent in China is 14.) Exactly why Xinbi Guarantee is legally registered in the US remains a mystery. Its incorporation record on the Colorado Secretary of State's website shows an address at an office park in the city of Aurora with no external Xinbi branding. The company appears to have been registered there in August of 2022 by someone named 'Mohd Shahrulnizam Bin Abd Manap" (WIRED connected that name with several people in Malaysia but couldn't determine which one might be Xinbi Guarantee's registrant.) The listing is currently marked as 'delinquent,' perhaps due to failure to file more recent paperwork to renew it. For fledgling Chinese companies—legitimate and illegitimate—incorporating in the US is an increasingly common tactic for 'projecting legitimacy,' says Jacob Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard's Asia Center who focuses on transnational Chinese crime. 'If you have a US presence, you can also open US bank accounts,' Sims says. 'You could potentially hire staff in the US. You could in theory have more formalized connections to US entities.' But he notes that the registration's delinquent status may mean Xinbi Guarantee tried to make some sort of inroads in the US in the past but gave up. While Telegram has served as the chief means of communication for the two markets, the stablecoin cryptocurrency Tether has served as their primary means of payment, Elliptic found. And despite Telegram's new round of removals of their channels and accounts, Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee are far from the only companies to use Tether and Telegram to create essentially a new, largely Chinese-language darknet: Elliptic is tracking close to 30 similar marketplaces, Robinson says, though he declined to name others in the midst of the company's investigations. Just as Telegram shows new signs of cracking down on that sprawling black market, Tether, too, has the ability to disrupt criminal use of its services. Unlike other more decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Tether can freeze payments when it identifies bad actors. Yet it's not clear to what degree Tether has taken measures to stop Chinese-language crypto scammers and others on Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee from using its currency. When WIRED wrote to Tether to ask about its role in those black markets, the company responded in a statement that it encourages 'firms like Elliptic and other blockchain intelligence providers to share critical data with law enforcement so we can act swiftly and in coordination.' 'We are not passive observers—we are active players in the global fight against financial crime,' the Tether statement continued. 'If you're considering using Tether for illicit purposes, think again: it is the most traceable asset in existence. We will identify you, and we will work to ensure you are brought to justice.' Despite that promise—and Telegram's new effort to remove Huione Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee from its platform—both tools have already been used to facilitate tens of billions of dollars in theft and other black market deals, much of it occurring in plain sight. The two largely illegal and very public markets have been 'remarkable for both the scale at which they're operating and also the brazenness,' says Harvard's Jacob Sims. Given that brazenness and the massive criminal fortunes at stake, expect both markets to attempt a revival in some form—and plenty of competitors to try to take their place atop the Chinese-language crypto crime economy.
