ING Bank: The Names Came Off, the Payments Went Through

ING Bank’s 2012 sanctions settlement with the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control set a $619 million civil amount, satisfied by the bank’s equal payment under its criminal agreements rather than paid on top of it. Under its parallel deferred prosecution agreements, the Amsterdam-based bank accepted responsibility for criminal conduct involving Cuban and Iranian payments through the U.S. financial system. Payment operations, trade finance and compliance employees would recognize the mechanism: information known inside the bank disappeared before other banks saw the payment. The dollars could move because the names did not.

In announcing the criminal information and deferred prosecution agreements, the Justice Department described conduct from the early 1990s through 2007, involving more than $2 billion moved through U.S. institutions. The commercial service ING provided depended on keeping those institutions from seeing whose business they were processing.

How ING Concealed Cuban and Iranian Transactions

In the criminal case described by the department, ING concealed payment origins and removed information identifying sanctioned parties. The concealment reached payment processing, trade finance and the instructions given to customers.

The same account says ING processed payments for its Cuban banking operations through its Curaçao branch without reference to their Cuban origin. It also provided U.S. dollar trade finance services to sanctioned entities using misleading payment messages, shell companies and its internal suspense account. The customer’s business and the payment’s outward description no longer told the same story.

The department said ING deleted payment data that would have exposed Cuban and Iranian involvement. It also advised sanctioned clients on concealing their involvement in dollar transactions. The concealment began before the payment reached a screening system: what the customer was told to submit, what an employee removed, and what the next bank received.

OFAC’s own settlement announcement describes more than 20,000 financial and trade transactions routed through third-party U.S. banks between 2002 and 2007. OFAC described intentional manipulation and deletion of sanctioned-party information, principally involving Cuba.

Endorsement Stamps That Hid the Cuban Banks

The concealment extended to travelers’ checks. The department’s account of the same criminal case says ING fabricated its own endorsement stamps for two Cuban banks to fraudulently process U.S. dollar travelers’ checks.

A stamp helped disguise the Cuban bank’s involvement just as a changed payment message concealed a sanctioned party.

Why U.S. Correspondent Banks Were Central

U.S. correspondent banks processed payments for foreign institutions, but ING withheld the customer information they needed to screen them. The Justice Department’s announcement said ING caused unaffiliated U.S. financial institutions to process transactions they otherwise should have rejected, blocked or stopped for investigation. The bank with the customer information helped remove the reason for the next bank to stop the payment.

The Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation’s 2024 white paper, Anti-Money Laundering: Opportunities for Improvement, argues that weaknesses elsewhere in a financial network can undermine the system and that international cooperation deserves attention alongside domestic monitoring. It also emphasizes that public and private institutions hold different information and expertise. Applied to ING’s conduct, the point is concrete: screening at the receiving bank depended on information the sending bank was deliberately concealing.

A closely related practice appears in Standard Chartered Bank’s sanctions case. The New York Department of Financial Services’ consent order records the bank’s earlier admission of intentionally stripping information identifying sanctioned parties. The earlier consent described omitted identifiers, cover payments and an internal practice called repair. In both banks’ cases, the content of the payment message mattered as much as the route the money took.

Management Knew, and Employees Had Raised Concerns

In its announcement of the criminal information and agreements, the Justice Department placed knowledge, approval and encouragement inside ING’s senior management and legal and compliance departments. It described conduct across business units in the wholesale banking division and locations around the world.

The department then recorded what happened when employees raised the problem:

The people approving the business knew both what the bank was hiding and that employees had objected.

For an insider, those are connected parts of the story. A payment message can show what information disappeared. An instruction or approval can explain why. A dated escalation can show who had the opportunity to stop the practice. We connect those decisions to the transactions they affected, so the case explains how the business kept moving after the problem reached management.

Aviation Parts Helped Expose the Payment Trail

The investigation grew in part out of inquiries into illegal exports from the United States to sanctioned countries, according to the Justice Department’s announcement. It also arose in part from a referral by OFAC, which was investigating ING separately.

The department identified Aviation Services International, a Dutch aviation company, as an example. ING processed payments through the United States for trade services connected to that company’s procurement of dual-use U.S. aviation parts for Iranian clients. The aviation company was already the subject of a criminal investigation initiated by the Commerce Department.

The export investigation gave investigators another way into the payments. That is why trade-finance knowledge can matter alongside knowledge of the wire itself.

ING Bank’s 2012 DPA and the Civil Settlement

ING reached deferred prosecution agreements with the Justice Department and the New York County District Attorney’s Office alongside its OFAC civil settlement. The Justice Department reported that ING accepted responsibility for its criminal conduct and that of its employees.

The department said OFAC required ING to test a sample of U.S. dollar payments to check whether its compliance program detected, corrected and reported apparent sanctions violations. That reaches the operating question this case raises: what information the bank actually sent with the money, and whether its controls caught the concealment.

What Payment Insiders Can Bring to a Whistleblower Case

Original and altered payment messages can show what changed between the customer’s instruction and the message another bank received. Routing instructions, customer records and internal approvals can connect that change to the business it served. Escalation records can connect the same transactions to management’s knowledge. These are the connections our whistleblower experts examine with someone who knows the payment process from inside it.

The reward route depends on the conduct. FinCEN’s whistleblower program covers Bank Secrecy Act and sanctions violations and can pay whistleblowers 10% to 30% of the penalties collected in an action over $1 million. A whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers. We work through the applicable program with you.

You Saw What the Other Bank Couldn’t

If you know why a country, customer or bank disappeared from a payment message, speak to one of our Whistleblower Experts about what changed. We build the case around your knowledge of the transactions and the decisions behind them, bring in bank sanctions whistleblower lawyers, and stay beside you throughout the case.