Reported by Joe Miller and Stephen Gandel

Drug traffickers chose to launder money through Citigroup because they believed the bank was “more favourable”, with less robust fraud controls, according to senior US law enforcement officials.

In an indictment unsealed last week, US prosecutors detailed how two California residents, who allegedly worked with the notorious Sinaloa cartel, deposited tens of thousands of dollars at Citi ATMs.

On at least three separate occasions in January 2021, they allegedly fed a total of almost $36,000 in illicit cash into the machines, a few hundred dollars at a time, waiting just a minute or two between each transaction.

By splitting the sum into dozens of smaller deposits, prosecutors claim, they stayed below the $10,000 threshold at which banks are required to report cash transactions to the US Treasury.

Drug Enforcement Administration officials told the Financial Times that the duo, alleged to be part of a vast criminal network that cleaned at least $50mn in fentanyl and meth proceeds in the US, scoped out several banks before choosing Citi.

One senior official said: “There are banks that pay less attention than others.”

A second senior DEA official said: “I will name one [bank]. There were two instances where in this investigation we had money couriers making 24 back-to-back deposits totalling $16,000 to a Citibank ATM . . . There were 15 back-to-back deposits totalling $20,000 also to a Citibank ATM . . . They figure out the places that are more favourable to them.”

While there were no reporting requirements for the individual transactions, the pattern of the deposits should have aroused suspicion, the DEA official said.

Read full report: https://www.ft.com/content/0187827b-f755-47fd-91ff-c3e755548097