TD Bank pleaded guilty Thursday to charges of money laundering and violations of the Bank Secrecy Act for failing to monitor money laundering by drug cartels properly and agreed to pay $3 billion to settle the case, Courthouse News reports. TD Bank, the 10th largest bank in the country, had systematically failed to address "systemic deficiencies" in its anti-money laundering policies over nine years, and in certain cases knowingly took bribes to open accounts for drug traffickers. At a press conference Thursday announcing the plea agreement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that TD Bank was the first bank in U.S. history to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and was the largest bank to plead guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations.
More than 90% of transactions went unmonitored between January 2018 to April 2024, which "enabled three money laundering networks to collectively transfer more than $670 million through TD Bank accounts between 2019 and 2023," according to the Justice Department. Between January 2018 and February 2021, one network alone processed over $470 million in large cash deposits, bribing employees with over $57,000 in gift cards to facilitate the transactions while failing to report suspicious deposits. The penalty includes a $1.3 billion fine to be paid to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and $1.8 billion to the Justice Department, totaling the largest fine under the Bank Secrecy Act.
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