Case Study: The Nirav Modi PNB Fraud, A Transaction Monitoring Failure

An intermediate case study for compliance officers at banks and NBFCs, aspiring forensic auditors and risk professionals that reads India's largest banking fraud as a failure of transaction monitoring and reconciliation, not just of individual honesty. You map the trade finance plumbing behind the scheme, from Letters of Undertaking and buyer's credit to nostro accounts, and the systems gap between SWIFT and Punjab National Bank's core banking platform where the fraud lived. You follow how roll-over financing kept the scheme alive from 2011 to 2018, how insiders defeated maker-checker controls, and why overseas branches of Indian banks kept lending. Then you work through the red flags that were sitting in the data, design the SWIFT-to-CBS reconciliation control and trade finance detection scenarios that would have raised an alert, and triage a Brady House style alert yourself. The course closes with how the fraud unravelled in January 2018, RBI's response on LoUs and SWIFT integration, the enforcement aftermath, and a control gap self-assessment you can run at your own institution.