Senate Report: Major Banks Enabled Jeffrey Epstein's Suspicious Transfers

Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America all helped Jeffrey Epstein make more than $1 billion in suspicious transfers, including payments to trafficked eastern European women, according to a report by Democrats on the US Senate Finance Committee.

According to the report, more than a dozen bankers at the three Wall Street firms were aware of suspicious transfers made by Epstein as far back as 2002, but the banks failed to report these transactions until years later, after Epstein had been arrested and charged with sex trafficking.

Epstein was a client of JPMorgan between 1998 and 2013, during which time he made 5,000 suspicious transfers totaling $1.1 billion, according to the report. Although JPMorgan dropped Epstein as a client in 2013, five years after his first child sex abuse conviction, the bank waited until after his arrest and death in prison in 2019 to retroactively flag these transactions with the US Treasury Department.

The Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed by JPMorgan included payments to women in Russia, Belarus, and Turkmenistan, to women who had “been in a relationship with Epstein,” or were “procurers of women as part of trafficking.”

JPMorgan’s compliance executives lobbied their superiors to cut ties with Epstein since at least 2010, with one calling him “scum.” However, senior executives – who, according to the report, knew about Epstein’s payments to trafficked women and joked about his penchant for “nymphettes” – overruled them, and kept the convicted pedophile as a client until 2013.

Deutsche Bank was also aware of suspicious transfers by Epstein, but only submitted SARs to the Treasury until 2019. Epstein transferred most of his assets to Deutsche Bank after he was booted by JPMorgan, and between 2013 and 2019, made 1,140 suspicious transfers, according to the report.

Bank of America failed to report $170 million in payments from billionaire Leon Black, who claimed he paid the pedophile for tax advice. Much of Black’s money ended up financing Epstein’s sex trafficking operation in the US Virgin Islands, and although the bank determined that these payments had “no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose,” it did not file SARs until 2020.

Under the Bank Secrecy Act, banks are required to promptly notify the government whenever they suspect money is being laundered or used to finance illegal activities. “The bankers who needed to be asking questions didn’t ask them,” the report states. “Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were hiding in plain sight.”

According to Senator Ron Wyden, the Finance Committee’s ranking Democrat, President Donald Trump’s allies attempted to prevent the committee from obtaining Epstein’s bank records. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent allegedly refused three requests to turn over details on the SARs, while Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have compelled the Treasury to hand over the files.