China’s underground financiers have specialized in international money laundering.
Three separate police investigations in Italy recently uncovered around 1 billion euros in proceeds from drug trafficking of the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta, Colombian drug cartels, and Albanian organized criminal groups. The more important finding may have been who it was determined had laundered the illicit money: Chinese underground bankers.
These cases illustrate how Chinese shadow brokers have emerged as the money launderers of choice of the world’s transnational criminal networks, facilitating payments across continents and cleaning up the proceeds of serious criminal activities. The increasing use of this system by criminals around the world is alarming European and U.S. authorities. The flows of money are particularly hard to spot, as the cash isn’t physically moved from one country to another and there is largely no paper trail.