Three news to start your week: November 18
Meta Fined $840 Million in Europe for Boosting Marketplace Unfairly
(The New York Times)
The EU has fined Meta Facebook $840 million for breaching competition law by using its Facebook Marketplace service for shopping and classified ads. This fine is the latest in efforts by regulators to stop tech giants from expanding their reach into other goods.
European regulators said that Meta benefited at the expense of rival services by combining Marketplace with the greater Facebook social network. This immediately gave the former unfair access to millions of potential users.
In addition, they claimed that Meta used its power in online ads to impose unfair trading conditions on competing shopping services, allowing it to acquire data to strengthen the Marketplace tool.
Founder of Crypto ‘Mixer’ Helix Sentenced to Three Years
(The Wall Street Journal)
According to prosecutors, Larry Dean Harmon, the operator of the cryptocurrency mixer Helix and the darknet search engine Grams, was sentenced in federal court in Washington, DC. In addition to his prison term, Harmon was ordered to serve three years of supervised release and forfeit assets, including cryptocurrency and real estate, totaling over $400 million. Prosecutors had sought a 75-month sentence.
Mixers like Helix blur the origin of bitcoin transactions by pooling funds from multiple sources and redistributing them, complicating efforts to trace financial activities. In 2021, Harmon pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors revealed that he handled approximately 354,468 bitcoins, valued at over $311 million, during the transactions, with a significant portion originating from or directed to darknet drug markets. Harmon reportedly collected a fee from each transaction processed.
Metro Bank fined nearly $21.5m for failure to monitor potential money laundering
(The Guardian)
The UK’s financial regulator has fined Metro Bank almost £17 million ($21.5m) for severe failings, which concern the anti-money laundering controls over four years. The bank nearly collapsed a year ago, and this is another setback for it. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced concurrently with the earlier-than-expected release of Metro’s Q3 numbers last week that it found deficiencies in the bank’s financial crime monitoring system from 2016 to 2020.
FCA said in its notice that Metro Bank began implementing automated monitoring of customer transactions for potential financial crime in 2016, but the system was not performing as intended. It found that any transaction conducted on the date the account was opened or until the update of the account’s records went past the system without any check.
