Criminals launder billions of dollars overseas through financial fraud schemes like wire transfer fraud,  corporate account takeovers, business e-mail compromise scams and other financial crimes.The FBI offers a Financial Fraud Kill Chain (FFKC) process to help recover large international wire transfers stolen from the United States.

The FFKC is intended to be utilized as another potential avenue for U.S. financial institutions to get victim funds returned. Normal bank procedures to recover fraudulent funds should also be conducted.

The FFKC can only be implemented if the fraudulent wire transfer meets the following criteria:

  • the wire transfer is $50,000 or above
  • the wire transfer is international
  • a SWIFT recall notice has been initiated
  • the wire transfer has occurred within the last 72 hours.

Any wire transfers that occur outside of these thresholds should still be reported to law enforcement, but the FFKC cannot be utilized to return the fraudulent funds.  Resources to help raise awareness about wire fraud can be found at alta.org/wirefraud.

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