Timeline

How’d we get here?

The people, businesses, and events that made up financial crime through the decades.

A Timeline: Major Fraud and Money Laundering Cases from the 1970s to Today

How’d we get here?

How did fraud and money laundering get to the point we are at today? If you want to follow the money you've got to study the greats. You've got to study history. How'd they do it? How'd they get caught? Go ahead, it's all investigatable.

This is a glimpse into the scale and depth that Financial Crime can reach. These are the people, businesses, and events that made up financial crime through the decades. Fifty-plus years of landmark fraud and money laundering cases, grouped by decade, each with a bibliography for a later deep dive.

They changed things (laws, regulators, bank controls), or they introduced a new method, they scared people, they ruined lives. Each is important.

Each decade below has a timeline table (year, case, type, what happened, scale) followed by a bibliography: books first, then official reports and court records, then key journalism.

Decades
1960s Soon
1970s 5
1980s 8
1990s 7
2000s 9
2010s 14
2020s 12

1960s

Coming soon

This decade is still being researched. Cases will appear here once each one is sourced.

Open the 1960s

1970s

5 cases16 bibliography entries

Fraud goes corporate and offshore

The decade's cases exposed fake assets built inside computers, offshore fund looting, and corporate bribery abroad, and they produced the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.

Open the 1970s

1980s

8 cases23 bibliography entries

Drug money, junk bonds, and thrifts

Cocaine-era laundering cases pushed banks into currency reporting and produced the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986, while insider trading and the "Savings & Loan Collapse" defined Wall Street and Main Street fraud.

Open the 1980s

1990s

7 cases24 bibliography entries

Global banks as laundering channels

BCCI showed a single bank could serve cartels, dictators, and terrorists across 78 countries, and the rest of the decade exposed private banking, correspondent accounts, and weak internal controls at major institutions.

Open the 1990s

2000s

9/11 era

9 cases23 bibliography entries

Accounting scandals and the biggest Ponzi

Enron and WorldCom produced the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the USA PATRIOT Act expanded bank due diligence after 9/11, and the 2008 crisis exposed Madoff, Stanford, and Lehman's balance sheet tricks.

Open the 2000s

2010s

14 cases35 bibliography entries

Mega-penalties, laundromats, and the first crypto frauds

US prosecutors turned AML and sanctions failures into multibillion-dollar resolutions, journalists at OCCRP mapped laundromats moving tens of billions out of Russia, and fraud moved into cyber heists and digital currency.

Open the 2010s

2020s

Covid era

12 cases28 bibliography entries

Crypto collapses, industrial scams, and AI fraud

Pandemic relief opened the largest government fraud losses on record, crypto platforms became both fraud vehicles and laundering rails, and organized scam compounds and deepfakes turned fraud into an industry. Cases run through June 2026.

Open the 2020s