With the theory out of the way, let us now follow the Probusinessbank money’s further moves once the sham loan scheme was done and dusted. Vermenda’s case is the best documented one.

The publicly available information about the accounts and companies implicated in that massive fraud is limited. But the official records we do have access are enough to paint the overall picture of the embezzlement patterns and for us to figure out the final destination those funds have reached.

After DMBL granted the loan to Vermenda, it should have been placed with a bank. To do so, they needed to find a bank unscrupulous enough to open an account for them to credit dozens followed by millions of dollars to, without the bank management batting as much as an eyelid.

A decent will inquire about the source and the legality of the customer’s income as well as the economic endgame of the intended transactions. Vermenda is a shell company with no assets or financial activity. Their endgame is to steal the Probusinessbank customers’ money. It goes without saying the account itself, as well as the transactions, may raise a few eyebrows. Not everyone’s, though.

Back in the day, some Latvian banks, including Trasta Komercbanka and Baltikums Bank , were offering a literally one-of-a-kind deal by letting anyone contribute their money, whatever the origin, to their system. Probusinessbank’s fraudsters were not by far their only dubious customers. Said banks were implicated in a number of other massive scams, including the Russian Laundromat scheme. So, these Latvian banks were not particularly inquisitive or principled, for that matter.

Vermenda opened a few accounts with those banks, and that is where the DMBL loans ended up.

Then came the second stage of the money-laundering procedures. To muddy the waters and conceal the assets’ origin, Vermenda engaged in countless transactions involving over a dozen foreign shell firms, such as Greenex, Finbay, Vesvora, Izatelom, Lankora, Larienta Management, Digitime, and others. We got access to the detailed transactions for these companies’ bank accounts, which enabled us to identify the final beneficiaries and piece together the journey the stolen funds had taken on.

Among Vermenda’s multiple transactions we have access to, none are indicative of it conducting normal business operations. No office space rent, no payroll, no internet bills—none of the usual stuff. Instead, they were shuffling back and forth billions of dollars, and those transactions involved the other shell companies present in the money-laundering scheme.

But some payments really stand out and are of particular interest.

For instance, in February 2014, Vermenda used its Latvian account to send three tranches for a total of around €2 million to the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s (ACF) current CFO, Alexander Zheleznyak. That happened long before the bank got delicensed. Think about it: part of the stolen money was transferred to the bank’s chairman for personal use.

On top of the $153 million embezzled through the DMBL fraud scheme, the Trasta Komercbanka accounts alone processed a total of almost $2 billion in “Vermenda’s money.” Vermenda also drew the money transfers from LIFE Group’s other subsidiary companies. These were all documented.

A series of Byzantine transactions eventually led to the bank accounts of Wonderworks, which was demonstrably owned by Sergei Leontiev. That was found by the Liechtenstein court that ended up seizing the funds.

Besides the Trasta Komercbanka money-laundering account, Leontiev somehow managed to open an account with the top-drawer Morgan Stanley bank in London on behalf of Wonderworks. That account was conceived as the final destination for the already laundered and legalized scam money. In December 2015, more than $105 million was sent from Morgan Stanley to Wonderworks’ Liechtenstein accounts.

On May 17, 2017, the Princely Court of Vaduz seized Leontiev and his companies’ funds. Liechtenstein’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) had found compelling evidence proving that it was the money stolen from Probusinessbank and then laundered.

So, it went beyond the theft. Money laundering is a prosecutable felony that, if proven, would land the banksters in a prison bunk. To avoid this miserable fate, they had to start laundering their reputations, too.