Reported by HENRY POPE

While synthetic opioids claim tens of thousands of American lives every year, illicit fentanyl and money laundering converge in a shadowy underworld that thrives thanks to enablers exploiting loopholes in U.S. anti-money laundering laws not seen elsewhere in the West.

Transnational organized crime figures launder the blood money through professionals exploiting the United States’ legal oversights, according to a recent U.S. Treasury risk assessment.

They funnel the illicit revenue through fake companies and wash it through convoluted accounting practices and other services protected by attorney-client privilege, said Scott Greytak, Advocacy Director of Transparency International U.S.

For example, Mexican cartels have begun to employ so-called ‘factureros,’ or billers, whose sole purpose is to create false invoices for purported legitimate services never rendered, providing a stream for their drug money to flow back south.

The funds are distributed across multiple factureros so that if one is compromised, the others remain insulated.

In one instance in October 2022, two U.S. citizens were convicted of processing hundreds of fraudulent transactions via cashier’s checks to launder tens of millions of dollars in illicit drug proceeds. According to investigators, the checks were remitted to various other compromised individual and business accounts, complicating efforts to determine the conspiracy’s reach.

Two months later, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security found a clothing wholesaler guilty of submitting fraudulent invoices through customs, whitewashing millions for the Sinaloa Cartel. The fine, however, totaled less than a third of the reported money actually laundered.

According to Greytak, the U.S. suffers from huge gaps in its anti-money laundering laws “that the rest of the Western developed world has closed off.”

Read full report: https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/18552-experts-say-drug-cartels-launder-illicit-profits-through-us-private-sector