FinCEN Director Highlights the Significance of SAR Filings

Anti-Money Laundering FinCEN SARs

On December 9, FinCEN Director Calvery highlighted at a joint FBIIC-FSSCC meeting the role of FinCEN in gathering and analyzing financial intelligence and the value of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) in curtailing malicious cyber activity. Calvery noted the importance of attribution information, such as IP addresses, timestamps, e-mail addresses, and the nature of the suspicious activity, when included in SAR filings, in helping FinCEN and law enforcement agencies deflect cyber-attacks, detect the source of such attacks, and identify members of money laundering networks. “For example, SARs filed by several different financial institutions played a vital role in furthering an investigation where a regional Florida bank had nearly $7 million fraudulently wired out of one of its accounts,” Calvery explained. Calvery emphasized the importance of including cyber-derived information (such as IP addresses and bitcoin wallet addresses) in SAR filings, noting that while less than two percent of filed SARs contain IP addresses, the information is “incredibly important to FinCEN analysts and law enforcement investigators working to combat cyber-crimes.”