Wells Fargo Fined $97.8 Million for Sanctions-Related Violations

Wells Fargo has been fined $97.8 million for sanctions-related violations from 2010 to 2015.

The bank reached settlements of $67.8 million with the Federal Reserve Board and $30 million with the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), the two regulators said in separate Thursday (March 30) announcements.

Wells Fargo provided inadequate oversight of sanctions risk and violated United States sanctions by providing a trade finance platform to a foreign bank which then used it to process $532 million in prohibited transactions between 2010 and 2015, the Federal Reserve said in its press release.

With that software provided by Wells Fargo and Wachovia Bank, which Wells Fargo acquired in 2008, the foreign bank located in Europe processed trade finance transactions that violated sanctions against Iran, Syria and Sudan, the OFAC said in its announcement.

“Wachovia, at the direction of a mid-level manager, customized a trade insourcing software platform for general use by the European bank that Wachovia knew or should have known would involve engaging in trade-finance transactions with sanctioned jurisdictions and persons,” OFAC said in the announcement.

Reached for comment, a Wells Fargo spokesperson told PYMNTS in an emailed statement, “Wells Fargo is pleased to resolve this legacy matter involving conduct that ended in 2015, which we voluntarily self-reported and fully cooperated with OFAC and the Federal Reserve Board to address.”

In other recent sanctions-related activity, the OFAC sanctioned 10 individuals and two entities affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in September 2022 for their roles in ransomware activity, cyber-espionage and other cybercrime.

The ransomware activities targeted organizations and officials around the globe, including a New Jersey municipality, several small businesses, a children’s hospital, several larger organizations and an electric utility company, the OFAC said at the time.

A month before that, in August, the OFAC sanctioned what it called the “notorious virtual currency mixer Tornado Cash” to settle assertions that the entity played a role in laundering more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency since its creation in 2019.

That laundering included more than $455 million stolen by a North Korea-sponsored hacking group that was sanctioned by the U.S., the OFAC said.