BoA Pays $1.21B, Nobody Goes to Jail; CZ Logs On With Receipts 🧾

Bank of America shares fell as much as 9% on Wednesday after the lender admitted willful failures of anti-money laundering controls and agreed to pay $1.21 billion in penalties to three US Treasury agencies. The Treasury announcement said the bank failed to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions on time, with over $1 billion tied to national security risks, including suspected Chinese money laundering networks, and that the bank often waited for law enforcement inquiries rather than flagging problems itself. The penalty cut quarterly profit by 17 cents a share; adjusted earnings of $1.08 per share still missed analyst estimates.

Changpeng Zhao, the former chief executive of Binance, seized on the outcome on Wednesday, contrasting it with his own prosecution. "No one went to prison. No home confinement. No DPAs. No one was even charged," he posted on X. "Water under the bridge. Onwards!" Binance pleaded guilty in 2023 after prosecutors said the exchange never filed a single suspicious activity report with US authorities and let users move roughly $898 million to customers in Iran in breach of US sanctions. Zhao served four months in a US prison after prosecutors sought three years, and President Donald Trump pardoned him in October 2025.

The Bank of America penalties were imposed by civil regulators within the Treasury Department, which can levy fines but do not bring criminal charges; criminal cases are handled by the Justice Department, which was not part of Tuesday's announcements. In May 2025, a Criminal Division memo broadened the paths for companies to avoid prosecution by self-reporting, cooperating, and remediating, and law firm Paul Weiss counted 21 corporate guilty pleas in 2025, reading the trend as a slowdown in corporate crime prosecutions. Then-Attorney General Eric Holder told senators in 2013 that he was "concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult to prosecute them."

Banks have faced criminal cases as well. TD Bank pleaded guilty in 2024 after employees were accused of helping launderers move funds, and prosecutors charged more than two dozen people, including two bank insiders. In April 2025, the Justice Department directed prosecutors to end what it called "regulation by prosecution" of crypto firms and disbanded its national crypto enforcement team. Bank of America disclosed the settlement alongside its quarterly results, and no executives have been charged in connection with the Treasury findings.