Bank of America Pays $1.21 Billion After Missing $5 Billion in Suspicious Transactions

Days after American Express was fined $350 million over a weak money-laundering watch, Bank of America has agreed to pay more than $1.21 billion in penalties, making this a week of two giant punishments for two of the country’s biggest banks. Federal officials concluded that Bank of America spent years failing to report suspicious transactions on a massive scale, including money tied to national-security threats. The Treasury Department announced the penalties on Tuesday, October 13, calling out the bank for treating its legal duty to watch for dirty money as an afterthought.

The total is assembled from three actions. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, assessed a $1.2 billion penalty, the third-largest in Treasury Department history. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency assessed its own $750 million civil penalty, the largest that agency has ever handed down, and that amount is credited toward the FinCEN total rather than added on top of it. Separately, the Office of Foreign Assets Control reached an $11.6 million settlement covering 475 apparent sanctions violations, involving payments of more than $14 million connected to Russia, Belarus, Iran, Burma, Somalia, and narcotics and global terrorism programs.

More Than $5 Billion Went Unreported

According to Treasury, Bank of America failed to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions. Over $1 billion of that involved what officials described as priority national-security risks: Chinese money-laundering networks, fraud schemes, and trade-based laundering connected to the southwest border. In some cases, customers had ties to narcotics trafficking that the bank’s own compliance staff had already flagged internally, yet the required reports still were not filed.

The conduct stretched from 2018 through 2025. This was not the bank’s first warning, either. An OCC cease-and-desist order was already in place from December 2024, and the problems continued anyway. Treasury said the bank leaned on tips from law enforcement and other banks instead of finding suspicious activity with its own monitoring systems, and that it put its revenues ahead of its obligations.

Unlike many corporate settlements, this one came with an admission: Bank of America admitted that it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act, the federal law that requires banks to detect and report suspicious activity. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s message, in substance, was that the country’s biggest banks are not above the law.

What This Means If You Bank With Bank of America

Nothing in these penalties means your deposits are unsafe, and there is no reason to panic or rush to close an account. But when a bank gets hit this hard over weak monitoring, its response is almost always to monitor much more aggressively. That adjustment can land on regular customers: transactions questioned, accounts limited or closed with vague explanations, and legitimate activity, like large cash deposits from a small business or payments to relatives abroad, treated as suspicious until proven otherwise.

You can make that process far less painful:

• Document the unusual. Keep pay records, invoices, and receipts for large deposits or transfers so you can show where money came from.
• Read your statements. Catch errors and unauthorized activity early, and report anything unfamiliar.
• Check your credit reports free at AnnualCreditReport.com, and dispute mistakes in writing.
• Ask for your ChexSystems report if a bank account is ever closed on you. A closure can follow you to the next bank, and errors on that report can be disputed and corrected.

Regulators just sent a $1.21 billion reminder that watching the money is not optional for banks. Keeping your own records straight is how you stay out of the blast radius when a bank starts watching everything at once.