Regulators and industry leaders have said Australia’s banks, non-banks, and intermediaries must overhaul how they think about fraud and financial crime, with the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre warning that reactive “crisis management” is no longer enough.
Opening a session on financial crime at the Fintech Data Horizon Summit in Sydney on Friday (8 May), attended by The Adviser, AUSTRAC director of regulatory supervision, Faranaz Alam, outlined that while fraud was not new, its methods were constantly shifting.
“Fraud is not new – it just happens in different forms, methodologies adapt over time,” Alam said, adding that the real question for banks and lenders was if they were “resilient enough to respond to this threat”.
Alam said AUSTRAC routinely saw institutions slipping into short?term damage control when a problem was identified as opposed to designing durable…
THE TD BANK INSIDER “BRIBE-FOR-DATA” SCHEME (USA)
Date: February 17, 2026 Perpetrator: Edward Low (Former Bank Employee)
Case Description: In a high-profile case of “Insider Threat,” Edward Low, a former employee of TD Bank in New York, pleaded guilty in a New Jersey federal court to accepting bribes in exchange for confidential customer data. Between 2021 and 2022, Low leveraged his internal access to harvest the personal details of high-balance account holders. He then sold this “hot data” to external fraud syndicates for as little as $26,700 in personal kickbacks.
The external fraudsters used the information Low provided to conduct “Account Takeovers” (ATO), creating fraudulent checks and falsifying bank records to drain over $500,000 from unsuspecting customers. Low even went as far as helping co-conspirators open shell company accounts at a second financial institution where he was later employed. He now faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison. This case has sent shockwaves through the global banking sector, highlighting that even the most robust external firewalls cannot protect against a “rogue insider” with administrative credentials.
Link to Original: US Dept of Justice – TD Bank Insider Plea