Key executives at Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase routinely ignored the suspicious activities of convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein because he was among their most profitable clients, paying millions in fees and holding influence over other wealthy people, according to a new investigation released on Tuesday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

The report looked at thousands of suspicious activity reports, or SARs. Those are confidential documents that banks and other financial institutions must file with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, the U.S. Treasury’s financial intelligence division, when they identify unusual transactions. Executives have 30 days to file a SAR when they suspect things like money laundering or payments to terrorists.

According to Wyden’s report, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase failed to do so for millions of dollars in cash withdrawals that had “no clear business purpose.” Instead, bankers let them ride, and together facilitated more than $1.4 billion worth of suspicious wire transfers over two decades—transactions they only flagged retroactively in 2019, after authorities arrested Epstein on federal sex trafficking charges.

The transactions they hid “included thousands of wire transfers, major withdrawals of cash, payments to women and girls, and correspondent banking in high-risk foreign jurisdictions (including Russia),” the report states. “They also include tens of millions in payments to his conspirator and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.”

The American Prospect

“JPMorgan Chase banked Epstein from 1998 to 2013. He and his associates held 134 separate accounts. More than $1 billion moved through them. The bank handled over $7 million in physical cash withdrawals — duffel-bag money, no explanation required — plus more than $3 million in direct payments to women, including wires to women in Russia, Belarus, and Turkmenistan. And more than $30 million to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, some of which bought her a helicopter.

When JPMorgan finally cut him loose in 2013, did it tell the Treasury Department what it had seen, like federal law requires? No. It waited until 2019 — after Epstein was arrested on federal trafficking charges and the delay became impossible to hide — and then dumped a filing flagging more than 5,000 wire transfers totaling $1.3 billion. That’s roughly 300 times what it had reported while he was alive and profitable.

Deutsche Bank picked Epstein up the moment JPMorgan dropped him, like a bar fight nobody wanted to break up. Same movie, second screening: after his arrest, the bank retroactively flagged more than $250 million in suspicious transfers. Wyden’s report describes Epstein’s own lawyer asking Deutsche Bank staff how much cash could be pulled without tripping an alert — and compliance wrote it down. Deutsche eventually paid New York regulators $150 million for its compliance failures. Federal enforcement? Zero.

Bank of America processed $170 million in wires from billionaire Leon Black to Epstein between 2012 and 2017, supposedly for “tax and estate planning advice” from a man who was not a licensed tax advisor. BofA didn’t flag any of it as suspicious until February 2020 — months after Epstein was dead — and later conceded the activity had no verifiable business purpose. Per Wyden’s investigators, Black supplied roughly 90 percent of Epstein’s income in that window, and in his settlement with the U.S. Virgin Islands, Black acknowledged that money helped fund Epstein’s operation there. (Black, for the record, has always maintained the payments were legitimate advisory fees, and his lawyer calls the report’s assertions outrageous and false. You can weigh that against the bank’s own admission about business purpose. Take your time.)”

…

Meanwhile, the compliance staff — the people whose job is literally “notice this stuff” — begged to cut Epstein off, and got overruled. Repeatedly. Per Dimon’s own sworn deposition, the final calls went up to the bank’s general counsel, who kept signing off.

“Wyden asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for them three separate times in 2025. Denied, denied, denied. Then in January 2026, Treasury quietly confirmed it had already handed those same files to the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee — while still stonewalling the Senate Finance Committee’s ranking Democrat. One party gets the records. The other gets a shrug.

Bessent’s public defence? That Treasury’s job is just to collect the reports. Which is hilarious, because his department fined TD Bank $1.3 billion and Capital One $390 million for exactly these kinds of anti-money-laundering failures. Treasury enforces this stuff constantly — apparently just not when the client list includes half the Forbes 400 and a former friend of the President.

When Wyden tried to force the records out with legislation — the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act — Senate Finance Chairman Mike Crapo personally blocked it on the floor. And Senator Marsha Blackburn, who has built an entire brand on demanding “Epstein transparency,” spent two years dodging Wyden’s requests to co-sponsor a bipartisan subpoena while publicly complaining about being stonewalled by Democrats.”

Side Note: It’s not unheard of.

As a reminder, during the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s, the U.S government had to resolve 474 failed banks with over $400 billion in assets. Importantly, individual bank executives were actually held responsible. 6,405 individuals were charged in major financial institution fraud cases. Prosecutors obtained 5,506 convictions, a 96.5% conviction rate. And 75.5% of those convicted, more than 3,700 senior executives and owners of failed savings and loans, received and served prison sentences. In addition, more than $45 million in criminal fines were imposed and courts ordered approximately $2.9 billion in restitution.