Patrick McKenzie reads from his latest Bits About Money essay, walking through why bank fraud charges are a prosecutor's favorite tool, how the Bank Secrecy Act's surveillance regime is designed to force criminals into impossible tradeoffs, and why lying to a bank is one of the easiest crimes to prove. He then applies that framework to the April 2026 DOJ indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, tracing how a covert informant-payment scheme run through fictitious shell entities to become a near-textbook bank fraud case. Part 2 releases next week.
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Full transcript available here: www.complexsystemspodcast.com/splc-financial-infrastructure/
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Links:
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(02:43) The strategic logic of bank fraud charges in white collar indictments
(05:47) Some worked examples of this in white-collar prosecutions
(10:49) Criminal law textbooks published on the Internet
(12:22) FFIEC BSA/AML Examination Manual
(19:07) A textbook prosecution of bank fraud in many respects
(27:48) This written communication is a succinct confession to bank fraud.
(32:27) Data products and mechanistic decisioning
