The federal government’s rush to roll out whistleblower portals has not (yet) translated into a surge of tip‑driven enforcement. At the same time, resource constraints and workforce turbulence threaten to hamstring agencies’ ability to act on the very information they solicit.
A Bulgarian national was sentenced in federal court in Austin on Wednesday to time served—38 months’ imprisonment—for conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in a scheme to illegally export U.S.-origin sensitive microelectronics to Russia, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas said.
A Pennsylvania federal jury on Wednesday found former coal executive Charles Hobson guilty of authorizing bribes to Egyptian government officials in exchange for lucrative state-owned contracts, concluding one of the few Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) cases to proceed to trial in recent years.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury announced that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has launched a dedicated webpage to confidentially receive whistleblower tips involving fraud, money laundering, and sanctions violations, alongside plans to provide financial rewards for eligible information leading to enforcement actions.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has reached a $1,720,000 settlement with a Florida boarding school for tuition transactions with sanctioned Mexican nationals for their children's education.
West Coast attorney Sarah Gerdes joined Akin’s international trade practice in Los Angeles at the start of the year as part of its national security & global investigations team after a distinguished tenure in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, where she most recently served as the Deputy Chief of the National Security Division and Assistant U.S. Attorney. In conversation with The Export Practitioner, edited for length and clarity below, she shared lessons from her experience leading national security investigations and advice for meeting the current moment in enforcement.
Testimony is underway in the federal prosecution of former coal executive Charles Hobson, whom U.S. prosecutors accuse of conspiring to bribe Egyptian government officials to secure contracts with a state-owned enterprise —an uncommon Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) case proceeding after the related company received a declination.
The United Kingdom’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) has escalated enforcement activity targeting the misuse of cryptoassets for sanctions evasion, announcing its participation in a new cross-government initiative known as the Crypto Cell.
Two men have been convicted of conspiring to illegally export U.S. military weapons to South Sudan. According to prosecutors, the conspiracy—spanning February 2023 through March 2024—sought to purchase and export, without required U.S. licenses, nearly $4 million in military-grade weapons and ammunition to South Sudan.
German federal prosecutors arrested five men on suspicion of operating a sanctions-evasion procurement network that allegedly shipped embargoed goods worth at least €30 million (about $35.5 million) to Russia, including to listed defense companies, authorities said.
Federal prosecutors have continued to build money-laundering cases against low-level staff of TD Bank N.A. securing guilty pleas from three branch employees in January. Despite the bank paying more than $3 billion in penalties, no senior executives have been criminally charged.
U.S. law enforcement, working with Bulgarian authorities, has seized three U.S.-registered internet domains linked to some of the largest online piracy services in the European Union, the Justice Department announced Friday.
Federal prosecutors on Friday announced yet another guilty plea by a frontline employee in the expanding anti–money-laundering cases tied to TD Bank N.A., underscoring enforcement actions that to date have focused on bank staff and external facilitators rather than senior executives.
A federal jury in San Francisco on Thursday convicted former Google software engineer Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets, capping a prosecution that the Justice Department has described as the first criminal conviction involving artificial-intelligence–related economic espionage.
The Justice Department’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement effort narrowed sharply in 2025 following a record-setting year in 2024, with prosecutors recasting foreign bribery cases as instruments of national security rather than broad-based corporate policing, according to the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section Year in Review reports.
A former TD Bank branch employee has pleaded guilty to accepting bribes and facilitating the laundering of over $26 million through the bank’s systems, becoming the latest low-level clerk convicted in the investigation into TD Bank’s anti-money laundering failures.
An Indian national was sentenced Thursday to federal prison for conspiring to illegally export controlled aviation components from Oregon to Russian end users, U.S. prosecutors said.
A new study finds that the Trump administration has broadly curtailed federal enforcement against alleged corporate misconduct during the first year of the president’s second term, scaling back investigations and cases across criminal, civil, and regulatory regimes with ripple effects for compliance programs nationwide.
The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a civil forfeiture action against two mission crew trainers seized while transiting from South Africa to the People’s Liberation Army, alleging the equipment was intended to enhance Chinese anti-submarine warfare capabilities using U.S.-origin technology.
A New Jersey man has pleaded guilty in federal court in Boston to charges stemming from a years-long scheme that generated millions of dollars for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) weapons of mass destruction programs by placing overseas IT workers into remote jobs at U.S. companies using stolen identities.