Title: Money Laundering Methods | Capture of El Chapo | Thomson Reuters Legal | Thomson Reuters
Headings: Money-laundering methods of drug cartels
and the capture of El Chapo

Money-laundering methods of drug cartels
and the capture of El Chapo
Thomson Reuters CLEAR

Content: This freedom from social constraints allows them to do whatever a particular situation requires. Money is any drug cartel's ultimate goal, which is why a large part of the federal manhunt for El Chapo involved tracking the Sinaloa cartel's financials around the world, in particular all the ways it sought to launder its profits. Even though El Chapo is in jail, the Sinaloa cartel continues to make so much money that one of its biggest challenges is finding ways to convert that revenue into usable currency. The U.S. banking system is at the center of these laundering efforts. Once illegal money is deposited in a U.S. bank, it is much easier to transfer and hide behind the smoke screen of an apparently legitimate business enterprise. That said, the Sinaloa cartel has invented numerous money-laundering strategies. They prefer a shotgun approach, and use every method they can to stretch the resources of law enforcement as thinly as possible. Of the many money-laundering methods utilized by drug cartels, "structuring" – depositing amounts smaller than $10,000 to avoid Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) reporting regulations – is the most popular, even though it's also the easiest form of money laundering to detect. Structuring is the most common reason Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are filed by banks, but it's also the most direct way to get money into a U.S. bank account. To push the odds in their favor, drug traffickers hire a veritable army of people to deposit small amounts of cash in banks all over the country, in cities large and small.