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Enforcement Release: November 6, 2023
OFAC Settles with daVinci Payments for $206,213 Related to Apparent Violations of Multiple Sanctions Programs
Swift Prepaid Solutions, Inc. d/b/a daVinci Payments (daVinci), a financial services and payments firm based in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, has agreed to remit $206,213 to settle its potential civil liability for 12,391 apparent violations of OFAC sanctions on Crimea, Iran, Syria, and Cuba. Between November 15, 2017 and July 27, 2022, daVinci, which manages prepaid reward card programs, enabled reward cards to be redeemed from persons apparently resident in sanctioned jurisdictions. The settlement amount reflects OFAC’s determination that daVinci’s conduct was non-egregious and was voluntarily self-disclosed.
Description of the Apparent Violations
DaVinci provides digital or physical payment reward card programs for corporate, non-profit, and government clients through an online platform. These programs allow daVinci’s clients to issue payment cards to select recipients,...
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1) Compare Enforcement Release - Tango Card, Inc., a substantially similar case involving “stored value products” transmitted over the internet to persons in or ordinarily resident in sanctioned jurisdictions.
The daVinci case is notable factually insofar as the payment cards were funded by presumably non-sanctioned entities, whose sanctioned employees were then permitted by the U.S. person daVinci to receive value. In other words, daVinci did not receive payment from the sanctioned individuals at issue, and the primary “customers” of daVinci were the contracting entities. Nevertheless, OFAC determined that daVinci engaged in sanctions violations due to a failure to geoblock IPs associated with sanctioned jurisdictions and provide services to individuals “who had used email addresses with…associated with sanctioned jurisdictions (e.g., Syria is .sy, Iran is .ir) during the redemption process and who were apparently resident therein.” There is nothing groundbreaking...