On March 21, 2023, U.S. law enforcement officials announced the unsealing of charges against Irina Dilkinska relating to her participation in the massive OneCoin fraud scheme.[1]  OneCoin, which started operations  in 2014 and was headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria, marketed and sold a fraudulent cryptocurrency called OneCoin through a global multi-level-marketing (“MLM”) network.  The marketing and misrepresentations tricked victims into investing over $4 billion worldwide in fraudulent cryptocurrency.  On March 20, Bulgaria extradited Dilkinska from Bulgaria and she was presented to U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn the following day.[2]

On January 31, a Finnish Appeals Court arrived in Liberia to begin a trial against Sierra Leonean rebel commander Gibril Massaquoi.  A lower Finish Court acquitted Massaquoi of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but this appeals trial will take place in Liberia because many of the witnesses were unable to travel to Finland.

On March 16, 2023, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the first ever extraditions from Guatemala to the U.S. on charges of human smuggling resulting in death and the first Guatemalan extraditions to the U.S. for  human smuggling of any kind in nearly five years.[1]

On March 17, Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the President of the Russian Federation  and Ms. Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, for committing the war crime of unlawful deportation of children and unlawful transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation under articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute. 

On March 15, 2023, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine released its final report outlining the main findings since the outset of its mandate.[1]

On March 15, 2023, the United States Department of Justice, Europol, and the German Federal Criminal Police (the Bundeskriminalamt) cooperated in taking down ChipMixer, a darknet cryptocurrency “mixing” service responsible for laundering more than $3 billion worth of cryptocurrency between 2017 and the present.  Among its activities, ChipMixer allegedly engaged in ransomware, the darknet market, fraud, cryptocurrency heists, and other hacking schemes. The operation involved U.S. federal enforcement’s court-authorized seizure of two domains that directed users to the ChipMixer service and one Github account, as well as the German Federal Criminal Police’s seizure of the ChipMixer back-end servers and more than $46 million in cryptocurrency.[1]  Europol supported Germany and the U.S. in the law enforcement operations.[2]

On February 13, a South African court ordered the seizure of a superyacht and two palatial homes owned by Equatorial Guinea's Vice President Teodoro Nguema Obiang.  The suit which drove the seizure was brought by South African businessman Daniel Janse van Rensburg who was unexpectedly arrested and imprisoned while on a short business trip to Equatorial Guinea in 2013.^[1]

On March 8, 2023, an English High Court rejected final efforts of Arif Naqvi, the founder of a failed private equity firm, to block his extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States for alleged fraud and money laundering.[1]

On March 8, 2023, a trial started in which Swiss prosecutors are prosecuting four banking executives for allegedly managing accounts that assisted move millions of dollars of money belonging to Russian president Vladimir Putin.[1]

On March 2, 2023, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson (Ericsson), a multinational telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm Sweden has agreed to plead guilty and pay a criminal penalty of more than $206 million after violating a 2019 Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA).