Bank of America faces $1.2 billion in penalties after admitting willful AML violations, renewing scrutiny of the compliance standards its CEO backed for crypto firms.
In December 2023, Senator Elizabeth Warren asked Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan whether crypto companies handling financial transactions should follow the same anti-money-laundering rules as banks.
“Absolutely,” he said. On Oct. 13, Treasury announced more than $1.2 billion in penalties against his bank. FinCEN found that Bank of America admitted to willfully violating the Bank Secrecy Act and failed to report over $5 billion in suspicious transactions on time.
FinCEN assessed $1.2 billion, including the OCC's $750 million penalty, the largest civil money penalty the OCC has assessed against a bank. OFAC separately announced an $11.6 million settlement covering 475 apparent sanctions violations.
FinCEN says the bank admitted violations in three areas: its AML program, due diligence on foreign correspondent accounts and the filing of suspicious activity reports.
More than $1 billion of the late-reported transactions involved priority illicit-finance and national-security risks, including Chinese money laundering networks and potential trade-based laundering near the southwestern border.
The OCC found deficient transaction monitoring across trillions of dollars in activity, late reports involving billions, insufficient BSA staff expertise, inadequate training, audit failures and weak remediation of a December 2024 cease-and-desist order.
Treasury said the bank relied too heavily on law-enforcement inquiries, referrals from other institutions, and external interventions to identify suspicious activity, with its internal monitoring systems playing a smaller role.
Comptroller Jonathan Gould described the second-largest US bank as processing hundreds of trillions of dollars annually, carrying a high and increasing illicit-finance risk profile and showing “widespread breakdowns” since the 2024 order.
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