China’s money launderers are bankrolling America’s fentanyl epidemic

Excerpt

Money laundering isn’t new — and neither is China’s role in it. Millennia ago, Chinese merchants developed schemes to “clean” the profits of commercial trade and avoid taxation. Today, their successors are doing much the same. Only now, they’re laundering billions through the U.S. financial system and fueling one of the deadliest fentanyl-fueled drug crises in American history.

In a step in the right direction, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (known as FinCEN) issued a sweeping advisory on Aug. 28 warning that Chinese money laundering networks now represent “one of the most significant money laundering threat actors facing the U.S. financial system.” Few Americans have heard of these Chinese networks, but they are using our local, regional and national banks to scrub Mexican cartel cash clean.

The government must do more to shut them down.

Max Meizlish, who previously worked in the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, is a senior research analyst for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘ Center on Economic and Financial Power, where Elaine Dezenski is senior director. Dezenski is also a former deputy and acting assistant secretary of Homeland Security.