Reported by FinCEN

Original alert attached here:

(Shortened version featured below)

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s (Treasury) Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), in coordination with Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is issuing this Alert to urge financial institutions to be vigilant in detecting, identifying, and reporting suspicious activity connected to the smuggling of stolen crude oil from Mexico across the U.S. southwest border into the United States by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), Sinaloa Cartel, Gulf Cartel, and other Mexico-based transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) — frequently known as the “Cartels.” In recent years, fuel theft in Mexico, including crude oil smuggling, has become the most significant non-drug illicit revenue source for the Cartels and enables them to sustain their global criminal enterprises and drug trafficking operations into the United States. This Alert is being issued in coordination with an OFAC sanctions action.

According to U.S. law enforcement authorities, the Cartels are using complicit Mexican brokers in the oil and natural gas industry to smuggle and sell crude oil stolen from Mexico’s state-owned energy company, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), to complicit, small U.S.-based oil and natural gas companies (hereafter “U.S. importers”) operating near the U.S. southwest border. Through these schemes, the Cartels are stealing billions of dollars of crude oil from Pemex, fueling rampant violence and corruption across Mexico, and undercutting legitimate oil and natural gas companies in the United States.