Wildman v. Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft, No. 23-132 (2d Cir. July 21, 2025) (published; no reporter citation recorded in CourtListener at the time of retrieval) was decided by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on July 21, 2025 (No. 23-132). The Second Circuit affirmed dismissal of the entire amended complaint and denied leave to replead, the plaintiffs having filed over 1,200 pages of complaints without explaining how they would cure the defect. Knowledge that one's routine services are being exploited by terrorists, even knowledge delivered directly by a U.S. general, does not by itself state a JASTA claim. The plaintiff must plead culpable participation aimed at the attack that caused the injury, not assistance to a sprawling enterprise.
The question before the court
Does a global bank aid and abet a terrorist attack under JASTA when it keeps providing ordinary banking services to a lawful customer after the government tells the bank that the customer's product is being diverted to bombmakers?
The governing rule
The Anti-Terrorism Act as amended by the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2333(d)(2), makes liable any person who 'aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance' to the person who committed an act of international terrorism, where the act was committed, planned, or authorized by an organization designated a foreign terrorist organization under 8 U.S.C. § 1189(a)(1). Liability is measured by Halberstam v. Welch, 705 F.2d 472 (D.C. Cir. 1983), as construed in Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh, 598 U.S. 471 (2023), and in the Second Circuit's Honickman v. BLOM Bank SAL, 6 F.4th 487 (2d Cir. 2021), and Kaplan v. Lebanese Canadian Bank, SAL, 999 F.3d 842 (2d Cir. 2021). The elements are a wrongful act causing injury, the defendant's general awareness of its role in the overall illegal activity, and knowing and substantial assistance. Knowing and substantial assistance is a single inquiry in which a lesser showing of one demands a greater showing of the other, and the defendant must aid and abet the specific act of international terrorism that injured the plaintiff. Dismissal was under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6).
How the court applied it
American service members and civilians injured in Afghan attacks between 2011 and 2016 sued Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, and Danske Bank on three financing theories plus a 'racketeering campaign' theory. The strongest was against Standard Chartered: it banked two Pakistani fertilizer companies whose calcium ammonium nitrate was smuggled into Afghanistan and made into IEDs, and it kept banking them after a 2013 meeting in which Lieutenant General Barbero told the bank the companies' product was the source of the explosives, that CAN IEDs caused roughly 80 percent of American bomb casualties in Afghanistan, and that the companies had refused to cooperate against smuggling. The panel accepted that this pleaded general awareness. It nonetheless held the claim failed at the knowing-and-substantial-assistance step, the same fault line Twitter drew when social media companies knew ISIS used their platforms. The allegations went to the value of the bank's services to its customers, not to whether the bank culpably associated itself with the Syndicate's attacks. Standard Chartered did not aid the bombers, did not help divert the fertilizer, and did nothing affirmative — the fertilizer itself was lawfully produced and sold in Pakistan. Because the assistance was peripheral, the plaintiffs bore a correspondingly higher burden on scienter and did not meet it. The racketeering theory failed on the statutory text: § 2333(a) and § 2333(d)(2) tie liability to an act of international terrorism, and enterprises floating above the actionable wrongs are not themselves torts.
What the court concluded
The Second Circuit affirmed dismissal of the entire amended complaint and denied leave to replead, the plaintiffs having filed over 1,200 pages of complaints without explaining how they would cure the defect. Knowledge that one's routine services are being exploited by terrorists, even knowledge delivered directly by a U.S. general, does not by itself state a JASTA claim. The plaintiff must plead culpable participation aimed at the attack that caused the injury, not assistance to a sprawling enterprise.
From the opinion
- “the complaint does not allege that SCB consciously or culpably sought to make the Syndicate's bombings succeed” — Analysis of Standard Chartered's banking services to the Pakistani fertilizer companies, after the court accepted that general awareness was adequately pleaded
- “Plaintiffs' theory of liability veers towards holding SCB liable for its refusal to stop providing routine banking services.” — Substantial-assistance discussion, distinguishing affirmative aid from continued provision of ordinary commercial services
- “Plaintiffs' campaign and racketeering theory, vast in scope and unlinked to any culpable conduct, contravenes the statute's text” — Rejection of the second cause of action, which sought liability for aiding a decades-long terrorist campaign rather than a particular attack
Why it matters for cyber conflict
Wildman is the closest analogue to suing the banks and service providers that unwittingly sustain a state-backed hacking operation: notice that your product or service is being abused, even authoritative government notice, is not enough without culpable participation in the specific intrusion. It effectively forecloses aiding-and-abetting claims against infrastructure providers whose services a state-sponsored actor merely exploits.
Editorial note: this case note was drafted with AI assistance by the JLCW Research Desk, checked against the text of the opinion, and reviewed by a human editor before publication. Every quotation above is carried through from the opinion itself. See our editing policy.
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