Richard Weber

Rich has a compelling combination of unparalleled experience at the highest levels of city, state, and federal government, as well as in private-sector investment banking and financial services. Rich has led, supervised, prosecuted, and coordinated numerous complex international and domestic multiagency financial investigations, including money laundering, tax, cyber, digital assets, and asset forfeiture cases. Rich previously served as General Counsel for the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS), where he was responsible for all legal and compliance matters in the agency that regulates the activities of over 3,000 banking, insurance, digital assets, and other financial institutions. Rich oversaw a broad spectrum of regulatory, supervisory, and enforcement actions and worked to ensure transparency, fair business practices, and public responsibility in the areas under his purview. 

Rich has particularly deep experience with respect to compliance matters related to banking, insurance, digital assets, cyber, and tax. He has worked with financial institutions, including federal and state-chartered banks, foreign branches, credit unions, credit-rating agencies, financial services companies, and digital assets businesses. He leverages his deep connections and experiences with the IRS, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, FDIC, OCC, CFPB, CFTC, SEC, FinCEN, U.S. Departments of the Treasury and Justice, and other domestic and international regulators on supervision and enforcement matters to counsel clients.

As the former General Counsel of DFS, Rich worked closely on supervision and enforcement matters related to AML, BSA, sanctions, digital assets, cyber, and other financial crimes. He served as the Chair of the Drug Accountability Board charged with investigating prescription drug spikes connected to the COVID-19 crisis. Rich also served as the Chair of the Monitor Selection Committee, Chair of the Audit Committee, and a member of the Virtual Currency Licensing, Risk, Cyber-Security, and Regulator of the Future committees. He also served as the Executive Sponsor of the African American Resource Committee. 

Prior to serving as General Counsel at DFS, Rich was Managing Director and Head of UBS’s Financial Crime Prevention Division for the Americas, where he led efforts surrounding anti-money laundering, the Bank Secrecy Act, sanctions compliance, fraud, FCPA, transaction monitoring, financial investigations, and anti‑corruption.

Rich also served as Deutsche Bank’s Managing Director and America’s Head of Anti‑Financial Crimes for the Americas. He led, implemented, and designed the bank’s legal‑ and regulatory compliance programs and oversaw all financial and internal fraud investigations, analytics, transaction monitoring, and financial intelligence.

Rich is the former Chief of the Criminal Investigation Division at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), U.S. Department of the Treasury, the sixth-largest law enforcement agency in the country. Rich led a worldwide staff of over 3,700 and coordinated complex domestic and international financial investigations involving money laundering, tax, sanctions evasion, cyber, digital assets, bribery/foreign corruption, fraud, terrorist financing, and asset forfeiture. Rich served on the Commissioner’s Senior Executive Team—working closely with every civil division head of office. He was also an inaugural member of the first-ever Enterprise Risk Committee at the IRS.

During his tenure at the IRS, Rich oversaw some of the most significant global financial-crime investigations in the history of the agency, including FIFA, Silk Road, and the Swiss Bank Program, in which 80 Swiss banks entered into agreements with the government and paid US$1.36 billion in penalties. Rich spearheaded the first-ever IRS‑CI cybercrime program and significantly enhanced the agency’s capabilities in cybercrime and digital assets investigations. Rich also modernized IRS-CI by developing cutting-edge, data analytics to detect non-compliance through artificial intelligence and algorithms. Rich was responsible for the forfeiture of over US$50 billion in criminal penalties.

Rich’s senior prosecutorial roles also included serving as Deputy Chief, Investigation Division, and Chief, Major Economic Crimes Bureau, for the New York County District Attorney’s Office; Chief, Asset Forfeiture/Money Laundering Section, for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division; and Assistant U.S. Attorney, Deputy Chief (Civil Division), and Chief, Asset Forfeiture Unit, for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York.

During his time as Assistant U.S. Attorney, Rich prosecuted and coordinated complex multi-agency domestic and international money laundering, financial, tax, and forfeiture cases, and prosecuted more than 100 complex international and domestic financial investigations. Rich has extensive experience leading complex, sensitive, multi-district, international, financial, money laundering, and terrorist financing cases. He provided legal and policy assistance and trained federal, state, and local prosecutors and law enforcement agents, banking regulators, and foreign governments on money laundering and asset forfeiture. He provides counseling on a broad spectrum of regulatory, supervisory, and enforcement actions.