The credit card-focused banking firm Capital One has been hit with a $390 million fine by US authorities for money laundering violations but will end up paying $290 million out of that amount. 

In a statement, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) noted that Capital One admitted to ‘willfully failing’ to implement an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) program required by law and thus has been billed for a $390 million civil penalty.

Out of the $390 million, FinCEN agreed to give Capital One credit for a $100 million penalty it paid to the United States Office of the Comptroller of the Currency over the same issue in 2018, meaning the bank will end up paying a fresh $290 million fine.

As charged by FinCEN and admitted by Capital One, the bank failed to file thousands of transaction reports with respect to a particular business unit known as the Check Cashing Group and thus caused millions of dollars of suspicious funds to flow through its bank from at least 2008 through 2014. 

The suspicious funds passed through Capital One due to the bank’s negligence included proceeds connected to “organized crime, tax evasion, fraud, and other financial crimes”, FinCEN says. One notable case is that of Domenick Pucillo, a convicted crime associate serving 10 years in prison that Capital One admitted it processed roughly $160 million for while aware of criminal charges against him.

Overall, Capital One admitted to negligently failing to file required reports for over $16 billion of transactions handled by the bank’s Check Cashing Group, and will now pay a big fine as a penalty. For context, $390 million sums up to 7.1% of the $5.5 billion in net income that Capital One declared in 2019 alone.

The fine from FinCEN marks just the latest for Capital One, which was ordered to pay an $80 million penalty for a data breach just six months ago, precisely August 2020.

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