Catch me if you can! by Barbie Kunkelova

I bet you a $100 bill that any person in this bank knows the name Frank Abagnale Jr. On the contrary, I bet they know everything about him. This young man was a criminal back in the 1960s, a pretty famous criminal indeed. He wrote false checks (worth more than $5.2 million) all over the world and represented himself as a qualified member of professions such as a doctor, attorney, sociology teacher at a university or American Airlines pilot. After 5 prosperous years he got caught but at the same time became so knowledgeable about fraud that he opened a financial fraud consultancy company after expiating 5 years of working for the US government without getting salary. He did all this for fun. What is the situation of "cleaning the money" today? Money-laundering, according to Wikipedia, is the practice of engaging in specific financial transactions in order to conceal the identity, source or destination of money. Both individuals and firms do this deception for personal gains. However, in order to spare some money, people don't have to necessarily hide money's background information. They can also deceive the law by tax evasion and tax avoidance. Or smartly participate by presenting false accounting. This is a natural part of the business world. The fun is keeping the won money. And I bet you even $500 that the Lloyds TSB Bank or Bank of Cyprus are not going to enjoy the outcome of their money-laundering. The US federal prosecutors filed charges against Lloyds of $130 million and of $162 million for Bank of Cyprus. In the case of Lloyds TSB Bank this is not the first fraud & the last one happened in year 2002.

related story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20071015/tts-uk-lloyds-bankofcyprus-suit-a8bf950_2.html

by Barbie Kunkelova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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