How signatures in public data helped expose the UK’s dirty money cottage industry Combining public data with leaked FinCEN reports, ICIJ’s data team plotted a matrix of shadowy straw men who filed false accounts worth more than $4.5 billion. February 10, 2021 Deep inside the FinCEN Files, a cache of more than 2,600 secret documents, lies a data story within a data story. Early in 2020, while the world was gripped by a deadly pandemic, the ICIJ data team was digging into the accounts of hundreds of shell companies filed with Companies House, the United Kingdom’s company registr...