How signatures in public data helped expose the UK’s dirty money cottage industry
Combining public data with leaked FinCEN reports, ICIJ’s data team plotted a matrix of shadowy straw men who filed false accounts worth more than $4.5 billion. February 10, 2021
Deep inside the FinCEN Files, a cache of more than 2,600 secret documents, lies a data story within a data story.
Early in 2020, while the world was gripped by a deadly pandemic, the ICIJ data team was digging into the accounts of hundreds of shell companies filed with Companies House, the United Kingdom’s company registration office.
This foray into public data was part of ICIJ and BuzzFeed News’ FinCEN Files investigation, which would eventually expose how some of the world’s biggest banks were at the center of a sprawling global money laundering industry. Reporting by more than 100 media partners showed how trillions of dollars of suspicious wire funds flowed through the banks, sometimes years before