The Department of Justice announced Thursday that TD Bank will pay more than $3 billion in fines and penalties over its failure to monitor hundreds of millions of dollars in money laundering operations by drug cartels.
“TD Bank created an environment that allowed financial crimes to flourish. By making its services convenient for criminals, it became one,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press conference earlier today, as reported by CNN.
Between January 2018 and April 2024, about 92 percent of transactions went unmonitored, allowing for “three money laundering networks to collectively transfer more than $670 million through TD Bank accounts.”
One such operation involved TD Bank employees receiving over $57,000 worth of gift cards in exchange for processing cash deposits from a money laundering network, totaling more than $470 million. The gift cards offered assurances that these employees would “continue to process their transactions” and not report the illegal activity.
According to The Hill, criminal organizations were able to open accounts and launder $39 million to Colombia with the help of five TD Bank employees.
“Despite significant internal red flags, the Bank did not identify that its own employees were conspiring to launder tens of millions of dollars to Colombia until law enforcement arrested them,” Garrick said.
TD Bank is accused of failing to oversee $18.3 trillion in customer activity over the span of six years.
A record $1.3 billion penalty will be owed to the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
TD Bank not only becomes the largest bank in U.S. history to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering under the Bank Secrecy Act, but the penalty imposed on the bank is the largest in the history of the BSA.
“We have taken full responsibility for the failures of our U.S. AML program and are making the investments, changes and enhancements required to deliver on our commitments,” TD Bank Group president and CEO Bharat Masrani said in a statement. “This is a difficult chapter in our Bank’s history. These failures took place on my watch as CEO and I apologize to all our stakeholders.”
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