On April 11, 2018, President Donald Trump signed the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (FOSTA).   The new law amends federal sex trafficking laws, establishes a new federal law criminalizing the promotion or facilitation of prostitution, and amends Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) to exclude from its protection acts that would constitute either a violation of federal sex trafficking laws or a criminal violation of the new federal criminal prostitution law.

On May 14, 2018, an indictment unsealed and issued by a federal grand jury in McAllen, Texas charges Jorge Zamora-Quezada, 61, of Mission, Texas with a $240 million health care fraud and international money laundering scheme.

At its 1312^th meeting held on April 4, 2018, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted its Recommendation CM/Rec(2018)6 on terrorists acting alone.

On May 3, 2018, U.S. District Judge Jon Levy in Portland, Maine sentenced William Sheldon to six months in prison followed by three years supervised release for trafficking juvenile American eels, also called “elvers” or “glass eels,” in violation of the Lacey Act.

On May 7, 2018, Nisar Ahmed Chaudhry, 71, of Columbia, Maryland, pleaded guilty to failure to file a Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) statement.

On April 7, 2018, police reports and relatives say a U.S. embassy vehicle driven by Defense and Air Attaché Col. Joseph Emanuel Hall collided with a motorcycle, killing 22-year-old motorcyclist Ateeq Baig, and injuring another person on the bike.  A Pakistani court has criticized Pakistani authorities for not imposing foreign travel restrictions on Hall.

In a 5-4 ruling issued on Tuesday, April 24, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) cannot be used to sue foreign corporations. With Justice Kennedy writing for the majority, the Court affirmed the Second Circuit’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit against Arab Bank PLC, a Jordanian financial institution with a branch in New York. The litigants claimed that the bank had facilitated transactions that had benefited terrorists that had committed attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Kennedy was joined in his opinion by the Court’s conservative flank. The case is Jesner v. Arab Bank.

On April 19, 2018, Transparency International issued a report titled, G20 Leaders or Laggards? Review G20 promises on ending anonymous companies.

The TI report discusses how the major cross-border “grand corruption” scandals have tarnished the Group of 20 (G20) countries in recent years.  It cites the fact that in 2017 Odebrecht the Brazilian engineering company was assessed a US$2.6 billion fine for bribery after being charged with paying US$788 million in bribes. In the “Russian Laundromat” scandal, exposed in 2017, a group of individuals in G20 member Russia allegedly established 21 shell companies, which then moved and laundered illegal proceeds out of the country, making more than 26,000 payments to 96 different countries including every G20 country aside from Brazil.  Increasingly, anonymous companies hide the identity of the person at the source of the funds either to launder and transfer stolen money, or to operationalize corrupt deals, using companies and offshore accounts to pay bribes or buy influence.