Up until the last decade or so, the financial industry has been more or less self-regulated. This lack of transparency led to a global wave of financial crimes – often leaving behind a trail of victims in its wake. Financial crimes come in many different forms and include classic pump-and-dump schemes, market manipulations and fraudulent practices or even stealing and blackmailing, tax fraud, cyber-hacking in relation to crypto-currency trading, including inducing people to invest in financial products that are unsuitable given their trading history and other factors. A few examples of recent large-scale financial crimes include the:
Royal Bank of Scotland LIBOR-manipulation scandal in which the bank was fined £208m by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission for hundreds of attempts to manipulate the rates in the United States, the European Union and Asia-Pacific regions (and succeeding on a number of occasions),
Madoff Ponzi scheme in the U.S. which left Bernard Madoff and many of his victims bankrupt, and
recently-decided case against Deutsche Boerse AG which was fined $12 billion in an insider trading case.