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With Clients Who Want to Pay Ransoms, Compliance Staff Should Tread Cautiously
By Colby Adams
printIt can be a rare but difficult moral dilemma for bank compliance officers: what to do when you know that a client wants to wire a ransom payment to kidnappers, a transaction that technically abets a crime. For-profit kidnapping is on the rise near the U.S.-Mexico border, which has placed "at least some" U.S. financial institutions in difficult situations, said Dick Hildreth, a former FBI Section Chief. "Eight years ago, the problem was largely confined to Colombia, but now [border towns] like Tijuana, Reynosa and Ciudad Juarez are like warzones," he said. While ransom payments are often wired through money...
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