The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit’s recent reversal of two Deutsche Bank traders’ wire and bank fraud convictions arising out of the LIBOR scandal in United States v. Connolly, 24 F.4th 821 (2d Cir. 2022), raises the question of whether this decision represents a further narrowing of the federal wire and mail fraud statutes or whether it is simply a one-off decision.

Although these authors suspect that Connolly may be limited because of the unique nature of the LIBOR submission process where it would have been very difficult for prosecutors to prove that a LIBOR submission was actually false, what is clear is that the federal fraud statutes have been limited significantly by the Supreme Court and the Second Circuit over the last 25 years.