US Bancorp allegedly failed to report Tucker’s suspicious transactions, including accounts registered with fake companies owned by Native American tribes which he used to spend tens of millions of dollars on a vacation home in Aspen, Colorado, and a professional Ferrari racing team, according to The Financial Times. By falsely registering his shell companies under Native American sovereignty, Tucker attempted to circumvent US usury laws.
Tucker was sentenced to more than 16 years in prison in January for running a fraudulent payday lending scheme on the Internet from a complex outside Kansas city. Tucker made several hundred million dollars by giving loans to people who could not get loans otherwise but needed the money to make ends meet, according to Bloomberg.
Authorities said he charged illegal interest rates as high as 1,000 percent on loans.
Tucker was also one of US Bancorp’s most profitable customers in the Kansas-area market, generating millions of dollars in fees for the bank.
The bank eventually closed his sham accounts registered with Native American tribes, but allowed Tucker to remain a customer for two additional years, never filed a suspicious activity report to authorities and didn’t end its relationship with Tucker until it received a federal subpoena in 2013.
According to the Department of Justice, US Bancorp operated its anti-money laundering program “on the cheap,” reducing staff members and capping the number of suspicious transaction alerts produced by its automatic monitoring system.
In a 2009 memo, the bank's chief compliance officer complained that the staffers assigned to monitor suspicious transactions were "stretched dangerously thin." The warning went largely ignored as the bank hid the problem from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to USA Today.
The US Attorney’s office agreed to delay prosecution by two years in exchange for the US Bancorp’s payment of the fine. The government will dismiss the charges if the bank enacts the appropriate reforms including improving its anti-money-laundering program.
About a third of the bank’s fourth-quarter earnings will go towards paying the fine. The Financial Times reports that the fine will be more than offset by the recent changes to the US tax code, passed by Senate Republicans in December.
