The rich business of fake consultants: banks are also in the crosshairs

The business of financial fraud knows no end. And each story always reveals details that are unbelievable. Afue (Association of Financial Scams Victims) filed a class action lawsuit against an abusive consultant in Turin.

The peculiarity is that this activity started in 2004 and was only recently unmasked: a duration of 20 years, if that is not a record, then it is. The perpetrator was a person who turned out not to be registered as a consultant and therefore not qualified to practise his profession. Clients were offered the signing of a private contract with the object of lending money for investment purposes, as well as the modalities of their repayment: in many cases, the random transfers made to the consultant were marked 'investment'. Each client's money was to be paid into two private bank accounts in the person's name. And here another important aspect of this affair emerges. An aspect that could perhaps open up a new front. "In the same lawsuit,' explains Afue president Daniele Pistolesi, 'we criticise the behaviour of the banks, which in our opinion should have stopped the collection in compliance with anti-money laundering regulations because large sums of money were flowing from the accounts without any justification. We also contested the client's lack of due diligence in addition to the obligations to report suspicious transactions'.

According to the association, the open accounts responded to the need to avoid excessive concentration of sums, which would have aroused greater suspicion and this allowed the illegal activity to continue for years. The advisor produced false reports in which he communicated the growth of the portfolio to reassure investors. Over the years, investors only requested small sums and the case exploded when claims for larger sums arrived. At that point, the advisor admitted to the scam, adding that the accounts had in fact been written off.

'The association,' explains Enrico Conti, Afue's lawyer, 'has sent the banks involved a request for compensation: the aim is to settle the dispute amicably before bringing the matter before the judicial authorities. According to Afue 'Article 35 of Legislative Decree No. 231 of 21 November 2007 requires banking and financial intermediaries to bring to the attention of the FIU, by sending a suspicious transaction report, transactions for which they 'know, suspect, or have reasonable grounds to suspect that money laundering operations are being or have been carried out or attempted, or that the funds, regardless of their amount, come from criminal activity'. According to Afue, the total number of investors involved in the scam would be around 70, with several million euro flowing through the various bank accounts.

The case does not appear to be isolated. The association also reported a similar phenomenon in Sassari. In this case, the collective complaint concerned the title of a site specialising in forex, a site not authorised to provide investment services. In this case too, the subject relied on a credit institution to receive transfers from savers. The transactions started in 2019. The savers were told that the sums were invested with foreign brokers specialising in forex, in reality according to Afue this money was immediately diverted for personal purposes. The bank is also being sued for failure to comply with European anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism and anti-mafia regulations. the misappropriation of money was estimated at over one million euros.