Search Results for: swift

March 16, 2017

N. Korea, Lazarus & SWIFT: Are the white hats closing in? (Update: SWIFT cuts off remaining N. Korean banks)

In the last month, major news stories about North Korea have bombarded my batting cage faster than I’ve been able to swing at them. I’d wondered when I’d have a chance to cover Katy Burne’s detailed story in the Wall Street Journal about the empty half of the SWIFT glass – that despite its recent decision to disconnect three U.N.-designated North Korean banks, it’s still messaging for banks that are sanctioned by the Treasury Department, but not by the U.N.:...

Categories Cyberwar/Money Laundering/NK Crime/U.S. Law
March 6, 2017

U.N. report: SWIFT banking network violated North Korea asset freeze

Since last year, this blog has covered SWIFT’s continued provision of financial messaging services to North Korean banks, despite suspicions that North Korea was involved in stealing almost $100 million from the Bangladesh Bank by hacking into SWIFT’s messaging software. Later, I wrote about an effort in the last Congress to ban North Korean banks from SWIFT, mirroring a sanction that was one of our most effective measures against Iran. SWIFT is effectively the postal service of the financial system,...

Categories "United" Nations/Europe/Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions
October 3, 2016

H.R. 6281, banning N. Korea from SWIFT, would be a powerful sanctions upgrade

Via Yonhap, we learned last week that Rep. Matt Salmon (R, Ariz.), the Chairman of the House Asia-Pacific Subcommittee, has introduced a bill to cut North Korea off from the “specialized financial messaging services” that banks use to send wire transfer orders around the world. The industry leader for financial messaging is SWIFT, whose headquarters is in Brussels, but which also has operations in Geneva and Manassas, Virginia. If you don’t know what SWIFT does and why it matters, I’ll...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law
May 27, 2016

Global wave of bank burglaries should revive calls to kick N. Korea out of SWIFT

In recent weeks, I’ve watched with keen interest, and some schadenfreude, as news reports have implicated Pakistani and North Korean hackers in a series of massive bank burglaries involving as many as 12 banks around the world, starting with the theft of $81 million (or $101 million, depending on which report you believe) from the Bangladesh Bank’s account in the U.S. Federal Reserve. These burglaries did not involve guns or ski masks. They were something more like armored car burglaries,...

Categories Money Laundering/NK Crime/Sanctions
October 10, 2005

Seven NK Refugees Enter SK School; All Are Swiftly Betrayed, Arrested, and Repatriated

I wish the South Korean government would stop pretending that it makes protests against things like this when the Chinese are so conspicuously comfortable about ingoring them: Seven North Korean defectors who entered the compound of a Korean international school in the Northwestern Chinese city of Yantai, Shandong Province, on Aug. 29 and requested safe passage to South Korea have been returned to the North. The group consisted of two men and five women, four of them from the same...

Categories Uncategorized
December 16, 2019

Review: Sandra Fahy, “Dying for Rights,” Columbia University Press, 2019

“In a penicillin bottle I wrote her date of birth, the day she died, and her name. I hung the bottle around her neck. I tied her hair. [The other prisoners and I] tied her legs. Her arms. We wrapped her body in a plastic bag. This is what happens in a prison camp in North Korea. That’s how we wrapped the dead bodies. When the warehouse has twenty dead bodies, we take those bodies to a place called the...

Categories Books & Films
April 2, 2019

“Liberal” South Korean authorities launch criminal investigation of political parody posters

At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern. “[T]he freedom to speak one’s mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty — and thus a good unto itself — but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole.” – Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, 50-51 (1988)....

Categories Censorship
March 6, 2019

Congress is losing confidence in Trump & Treasury on North Korea sanctions

Yesterday, Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) introduced a new version of the Otto Warmbier Banking Restrictions Involving North Korea, or BRINK Act, which I wrote about here in 2017. You can read the two Senators’ summaries of the bill here and here. Otto’s parents also provided a supportive statement. Congress’s patience, which has long been near a breaking point, has reached it. Perhaps it’s not completely fair that Trump is now reaping the frustrations that were...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
November 27, 2018

DOJ sues to forfeit $3M linked to N. Korean money laundering, proliferation financing & slave labor

This afternoon, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia filed suit to forfeit just over $3 million that three defendants allegedly laundered for an interconnected network of North Korean banks and front companies, in violation of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act: $599,930.00 in funds “associated with” Cooperating Company 1 of Singapore, which agreed not to contest the forfeiture (and hopefully more), and which used “a bank account in...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law
May 9, 2018

To save Korea’s democracy, withdraw its American security blanket

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” – Samuel Johnson Most Korea-watchers will view the recent hints from both Seoul and Washington about a U.S. withdrawal with alarm, and as a grave risk to the security of both Korea and Japan. Indeed, it’s one more development that’s consistent with my hypothesis that Pyongyang means to coerce and cajole Seoul into submission, first by lowering the South’s...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Korean Society/Korean War II/North-South/Sunshine
December 11, 2017

Korean War II: A Hypothesis Explained, and a Fisking (Annotated)

(Update, May 2018: A hypothesis should to be tested by its predictive record. I’ve now watched, with growing alarm, how events since the publication of this post have validated it as a predictive model. I’ve recently gone back and embedded footnotes throughout, to indicate which specific predictions have been validated, or not.) In the last several months, as Pyongyang has revealed its progress toward acquiring the capacity to destroy an American city, the North Korea commentariat has cleaved into two...

Categories Fiskings/Korean War II
September 18, 2017

The State Department’s efforts to isolate Pyongyang are starting to pay off

The reviews of Rex Tillerson are in, and most of them aren’t good. We could have predicted this ten months ago; after all, most of the commentariat harbors center-left or pro-“engagement” views and it wasn’t going to agree with Trump’s policies anyway. Still, it’s hard for me to accept at face value the criticisms of those who have defended, to varying degrees, the self-evidently disastrous North Korea policies of Barack Obama and second-term G.W. Bush — policies that have more...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions
July 28, 2017

After a near miss in the Senate, the KIMS Act heads for the President’s desk

While the rest of you talk about missiles, I’m going to talk about responses. Last night, by a vote of 98 to 2, the Senate passed H.R. 3364, a bill imposing new sanctions against Russia, Iran,* and North Korea. The bill previously passed the House by a vote of 419 to 3, and now goes to the President’s desk. The North Korea sanctions are contained in Title III, which previously passed the House as the KIMS Act by a vote of...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
July 24, 2017

OFK Exclusive: House, Senate move new North Korea sanctions legislation

Last year, Ed Royce, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Cory Gardner, Chairman of the Senate Asia Subcommittee, led the charge to cut Pyongyang’s access to the hard currency that sustains it by drafting and passing the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act. We’ve known all along that nothing short of presenting Kim Jong-Un with an existential choice — disarm and reform, or perish — would create the conditions for a negotiated disarmament of North Korea,...

Categories Arms Trafficking/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions/U.S. Law
July 10, 2017

Why Moon Jae-In can’t make the sun shine again

Given the background of Moon Jae-In and some of his closest confidants, the question that has nagged at me is whether Moon is (1) a closet hard-left ideologue who has managed to let everyone around him say and do the extreme things he avoids saying and doing himself; (2) just another oleaginous opportunist who paddled his canoe to the swifter currents on the left side of the stream; or (3) a hopelessly naive squish who thinks he can simultaneously charm,...

Categories An Alliance?/Korean Politics/North-South/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
July 7, 2017

Stop talking about bombing North Korea. Talk about the revolution it desperately needs.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.  – Sun Tzu On the Fourth of July, I had a long talk with a Famous Person who would probably prefer that I not mention his name here. He’s famous (or infamous — your mileage may vary) for his association with a foreign policy philosophy described as “neoconservative,” whatever that means. Like many Famous Persons, this person’s public image is an injustice to his actual views, which sounded...

Categories Resistance
March 23, 2017

WSJ: Feds may indict North Koreans in Bangladesh Bank fraud

This story just gets more interesting by the day: Federal prosecutors are building cases that would accuse North Korea of directing one of the biggest bank robberies of modern times, the theft of $81 million from Bangladesh’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last year, according to people familiar with the matter. The charges, if filed, would target alleged Chinese middlemen who prosecutors believe helped North Korea orchestrate the theft, the people said. The current cases being pursued...

Categories Cyberwar/NK Crime/U.S. Law
March 22, 2017

Royce introduces bill to toughen sanctions on N. Korea; subcommittee holds hearing

The big news yesterday was that Ed Royce, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has introduced a sequel to the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, or NKSPEA. You can read the full text here, but briefly, the bill — Expands the mandatory and discretionary sanctions in NKSPEA 104 to match the sanctions added by UNSCR 2270 and UNSCR 2321. It also adds a few more, like authorizing Treasury to sanction anyone who imports food from North Korea — a...

Categories China/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics