FINRA warned member firms of a phishing email from a purported anti-money laundering compliance officer working at an Indiana-based credit union. The email alerted recipients about a potential case of money laundering and invited recipients to open an attachment that likely contained malware designed to hack the recipient's computer network.

The European Commission published a list of jurisdictions it identified as having strategic anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism ("AML/CFT") deficiencies. The European Commission list includes 12 jurisdictions already on the Financial Action Task Force ("FATF") list of jurisdictions with strategic deficiencies, and adds 11 additional jurisdictions, including the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The U.S. Department of the Treasury ("Treasury") responded that it has "significant concerns about the substance of the list

The U.S. Treasury Department Office of Financial Research ("OFR") adopted final rules establishing a data collection requiring the reporting of certain information about centrally cleared transactions in the U.S. repurchase agreement ("repo") market to the OFR. As previously covered, the final rule will require certain U.S. central counterparties ("CCPs") to report daily on repo transactions. The primary purposes of the final rule are to (i) enable the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the OFR to identify and monitor risks to financial stability and (ii) improve the calculations of

An audit firm based in Japan, its former CEO, and its former acting reputation and risk leader ("RRL") (collectively, the "Respondents") agreed to settle SEC charges for violating auditor independence rules. According to the SEC Order, the firm issued audit reports for a client when many employees kept bank accounts with the client's subsidiary. The firm violated the SEC auditor independence rules because the accounts had balances exceeding the amount insured by the Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan. The SEC Order also found that the Respondents caused the audit client to violate

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ("CFPB") provided its semi-annual report to Congress. The report outlines issues faced by consumers, as well as consumer complaints and internal improvements, during a six-month period commencing on April 1, 2018 and ending on September 30, 2018. According to the CFPB, the two most significant consumer issues regarding financial products or services are (i) credit invisibility and (ii) mortgage shopping. "Credit invisible" is the term used to describe consumers who do not have a credit record maintained by one of the three consumer reporting agencies