From mobile phones in Miami to T-shirts in Los Angeles, drug organizations are finding ways to convert illicit U.S. dollars into pesos for cartels in Mexico and South America.
Long gone are the days when it was easy to walk into a bank with a bag of drug-related cash to be deposited. With strict federal reporting requirements for cash deposits over $10,000 and sophisticated money laundering monitoring systems, new methods had to be found to pay the drug kingpins.
So cartels such as the Sinaloa and Los Zetas have turned to trade-based money laundering, in which dollars are used to purchase legitimate goods in the U.S. — or at least to make the transactions appear legitimate — which are then sold in Latin America for pesos.
For example, dollars a Mexican drug cartel collects from U.S. sales could be used to buy cellphones from an American company, which knowingly participates. The phones are shipped to Mexico and sold in pesos, allowing the cartel to make the money appear legitimate.