Special Report: How Mexican narcos use remittances to wire U.S. drug profits home

Euronet Worldwide

18/08/2023 12:00

(For more Reuters Special Reports, click on  SPECIAL/ )
    By Diego Oré
       CULIACÁN, Mexico, Aug 18 (Reuters) - A Mexican mother
walked into a bank in her home city of Culiacán in the Mexican
state of Sinaloa, where an $8,000 remittance from the United
States was waiting. She withdrew the funds in local currency,
then strolled across town and deposited nearly all of it into
accounts at two different banks.
    Money sent home by migrant workers is a lifeline for
millions of Mexicans. But the woman had never met the person who
wired her the funds, nor the owners of the accounts where she
took the cash. What she did know: The deal had been carefully
arranged by the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the world's largest drug
trafficking groups, to repatriate profits from U.S. drug sales
back to Mexico disguised as a routine remittance.
    Her cut: $230 worth of Mexican pesos.
    It was the start of easy money for the woman, who said she
previously had struggled to make ends meet cleaning houses.
Recalling that day in April 2014 for Reuters, she estimated she
had earned some $17,000 over the years recruiting others into
the scheme and cashing remittances totaling hundreds of
thousands of dollars – but never too much or too often, so as to
avoid scrutiny by banking authorities. She said a neighbor got
her into the game, and that she had never met her bosses in
person.
    “Everything was by phone,” she said, “and the phone numbers
changed every time.”
    The woman showed Reuters WhatsApp messages on her phone that
she said were from traffickers coordinating her remittance
pickups and drop-offs. One from early 2022 said: “They are
waiting for you outside. They know who you are. Give them the
money.”
    The Culiacán mother is part of an army of civilians
recruited by the Sinaloa Cartel and other drug syndicates across
Mexico to help move illicit drug profits earned in the United
States south of the border. The criminal scheme essentially
piggybacks on the vast legal network of money-transfer firms
that help migrant laborers send money home to their families.
    Remittances to Mexico, nearly all of which come from the
United States, hit a record $58.5 billion last year, according
to data from Mexico’s central bank. That’s an increase of $25
billion, or 74%, compared to 2018, when President Andrés Manuel
López Obrador came to power. Mexico’s economy has been slow to
recover from the coronavirus pandemic, a factor that has boosted
migration to the United States in recent years along with the
remittances that workers send home.
    As legitimate remittances have ballooned, it has become ever
easier for cartels to disguise their ill-gotten gains in small
transfers sent to average people across Mexico who have no
obvious links to organized crime, according to four U.S. and
Mexican security officials.
    The cartels are awash in cash from U.S. sales of fentanyl,
cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana. Presently, up
to 10% of all Mexico-bound remittances may be drug money moved
by criminal organizations like the Sinaloa Cartel and the
Jalisco New Generation Cartel, according to a U.S. government
official who works on illicit finance and asked for anonymity
because he is not authorized to speak publicly on the subject. A
March report by the Mexico think tank Signos Vitales estimated
that at least $4.4 billion, or 7.5%, of remittances sent to
Mexico last year could come from illegal activity.
    Several features of the remittance sector make it an
attractive vehicle through which criminal funds can enter the
financial system, according to four industry executives and the
Mexican and U.S. law enforcement officials. Chief among them is
the worldwide reach of this network and the modest-sized cash
transactions that drive it. Identification requirements for such
transfers are more relaxed than those needed to set up a formal
bank account or to wire significant sums of money.
    Cases of crime groups using popular money-transfer services
to conduct illegal activities have been documented before.
Reuters reported previously on how gangs operating on both sides
of the U.S.-Mexico border have kidnapped migrant workers and
held them for ransom, demanding that relatives wire remittances
to free them.
    Now the news agency is the first to detail how Mexican drug
gangs have harnessed legitimate remittance networks to
repatriate their U.S. drug profits, and the factors that make
this activity so difficult for authorities to detect and thwart.
    Reuters interviewed two dozen Mexico residents who said they
had been paid by the Sinaloa Cartel to act as conduits for
remittances, turning the money over to cartel operatives after
receiving it. Records from eight U.S. federal court cases, along
with a Reuters analysis of Mexican migration data and interviews
with a dozen industry insiders, analysts and law enforcement
agents on both sides of the border, paint a detailed picture of
how the criminal venture works.
    Seven money-transfer firms and banks that responded to
Reuters’ queries said they are constantly working to thwart
criminals. Colorado-based Western Union, the world’s largest
money-transfer operator, said in a statement that it devotes
“significant resources to help detect and deter the misuse of
our services.”
    Jorge Godínez, Americas director for WorldRemit, a
London-based money-transfer service, was skeptical that crooks
would turn to remittances to move vast sums of money in
bite-sized chunks. “They would need to do a lot of
transactions,” Godínez said. “I don't rule it out, but it's a
little more work.”
    But drug syndicates appear to be doing just that, due in
part to the coronavirus.
    The use of remittances to move drug money was supercharged
by the COVID-19 pandemic after long-established travel routes
were upended by closures and lockdowns, according to four
security officials from the United States and Mexico. Between
March 2020 and November 2021, the U.S.-Mexico border was closed
to all but “essential” travel. That made the traditional method
of repatriating drug profits -  bulk smuggling of cash hidden in
southbound cars, trucks and cargo trailers -  much harder.
Traffickers turned to other means, the security sources said,
resulting in a heavier reliance on remittances. It’s an approach
that has endured even as the public health emergency has
receded, they said, because the networks the narcos established
are effective.
    In a sign of growing concern within the U.S. government, the
office of the Director of National Intelligence, the principal
provider of intelligence to the president, included for the
first time this year in its annual threat assessment report the
"exploitation of legitimate remittances channels" by
transnational crime organizations to launder money. The report
did not single out any money-transfer companies.
    The use of such transfers by narcos is not a new phenomenon,
but the huge increase in remittances from the United States to
Mexico in recent years “helps obfuscate this practice,”
according to a person familiar with the report. The Sinaloa
Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel are believed to be
among the drug syndicates using remittances to repatriate drug
proceeds, the person said.
    (For a web-based version of this story, click here.) 
        
  
    ‘MANY TO MANY’
    There is a clear pattern for how money is laundered via
remittances, according to the U.S. official who works on illicit
finance, people who have participated in the scheme in Mexico,
and federal court documents reviewed by Reuters from U.S. money
laundering prosecutions.
    In the United States, much of the remittance trade is
conducted through corner stores, chain retailers and currency
exchanges. These businesses sign on as agents with one or more
of the money-transfer companies, for example Western Union, and
display the familiar logos of these firms in their shops to
entice customers. The retailers receive training from the
money-transfer companies on how to use their technology
platforms, spot fishy transactions and comply with U.S.
anti-money laundering laws. Agents are paid a commission for
each transaction they process. Customers can bring cash to these
storefronts and send it abroad. Neither senders nor receivers
are required to have a bank account.
    This fragmented network is key to the functioning of the
scheme, according to the people and documents. Although
money-transfer companies have internal systems designed to spot
and curtail illegal activity, controls largely rely on checks
done face-to-face with customers at the shop level. Thus,
protections are only as robust as the honesty and diligence of
these mom-and-pop agents, some of whom are purportedly in league
with drug traffickers, according to law enforcement sources and
the eight federal court cases reviewed by Reuters that involved
alleged laundering of drug money via money transfers.
    Republican U.S. Senator John Cornyn of Texas in 2019
introduced a bill that would require the Secretary of the
Treasury to analyze the use of remittances by criminals for
narcotics trafficking and other illicit activities, and come up
with a strategy for stopping it. That proposed legislation
became part of a larger anti-money laundering bill introduced
last year by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa that failed to come
up for a vote in Congress.
    “The overdose crisis in the United States makes attacking
the cartels in their pocketbook all the more urgent,” Grassley
said in a statement to Reuters. He said he’s working to
reintroduce the legislation.
    Cornyn’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
    The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen) of the
U.S. Department of the Treasury, whose job is to thwart money
laundering, said in an emailed statement that it "consistently
monitors and evaluates enforcement matters" against financial
institutions, including remittance companies. The statement said
that FinCen, as a matter of policy, doesn’t comment on
investigations or confirm whether a probe is under way.
    Currently, U.S. law mandates that money transmitters keep
records of all transactions of $3,000 or more for five years,
including names and addresses of people on both ends of each
transfer. Suspicious activity must be reported to FinCen. To
stay under the radar, crooks tend to keep their transactions
below the $3,000 threshold, according to the court documents and
the people who said they laundered money this way.
    Remittance shops have their own internal procedures as well,
and many routinely require senders to show identification and
provide telephone numbers for transfers of any size. But this
information is easily fabricated, particularly by corrupt
insiders running these storefronts, making it difficult for law
enforcement to identify patterns, according to documents from
the eight federal cases and officials on both sides of the
border.
    The process of dividing large amounts of money into smaller
transactions to avoid reporting requirements is commonly known
as “smurfing” or “structuring.” Mobilizing large numbers of
people or “smurfs” to send and receive those modest sums is
referred to as “many to many” by U.S. law enforcement agents. 
U.S.-based accomplices sending money south can earn kickbacks
from the cartels as high as 10% of the value of individual
transfers that rarely exceed $1,000, according to the U.S.
official and a 2019 federal indictment of alleged criminals
running an Ohio money laundering ring.
    The average size remittance sent to Mexico in 2022 was $390,
according to data from the country’s central bank. Those funds
often are sent to Mexican merchants including convenience
stores, supermarkets, pharmacies and department stores.
    Two dozen Mexico-based smurfs who said they work for the
Sinaloa Cartel told Reuters they prefer dealing with retailers
because those businesses tend to ask fewer questions than banks
do. They said they typically are required to show their official
voter ID card; provide the name of the sender and their
relationship to that person; and present a transaction tracking
number that senders share only with recipients - details
provided to them in advance by the cartel via texts or WhatsApp
messages.
    Receivers in Mexico typically keep 1% of the proceeds as
compensation, the people said, with new recruits pocketing a
larger share on their first transaction to entice them into the
racket. Security officials said Mexican smurfs are paid less
than their U.S. counterparts because the risk of arrest is
lower. A Reuters search of Mexican court records dating back to
2012 turned up no cases involving money laundering through
remittances.
    Mexico’s presidency and Attorney General’s office did not
respond to requests for comment about the country’s strategy for
combating alleged money laundering via remittances. The
Financial Intelligence Unit, which investigates financial
crimes, also declined to comment.
    In the United States, at least seven drug trafficking cases
that involved the use of remittances to send profits to Mexico
have been successfully prosecuted since 2017 in federal courts
in Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia and
Washington state. Collectively, those cases involved the
laundering of more than $100 million between 2013 and 2020,
according to court documents filed by prosecutors. At least 81
individuals charged in those cases have pleaded guilty to crimes
including conspiracy to commit money laundering and to
distribute narcotics, and illegal possession of firearms.
    Then-U.S. Attorney John Horn, who prosecuted the Georgia
case, said Mexican cartels “may have found an effective means
through unscrupulous remitters” to get their drug profits back
to Mexico, according to a June 21, 2017, press release issued at
the time of the Georgia indictments. Horn declined to comment.
    The government in that case alleged that 11 defendants used
remittances to launder more than $40 million from 2013 to 2017
at nine small businesses in metro Atlanta that offered
money-transfer services, including a gas station and a taco
restaurant. Nine of the defendants pleaded guilty, while two
remain fugitives. All were shop managers or employees whom
prosecutors said knowingly accepted large amounts of cash from
drug traffickers, broke it up into small transactions to evade
reporting requirements, and wired it under the names of
fictitious customers in exchange for kickbacks.
    Of the nine defendants sentenced to jail time, one remains
in prison and six were released, according to Federal Bureau of
Prisons records, which contained no information on the remaining
two.
    Reuters was unable to contact attorneys for six of those
nine defendants because most records for the case are under
seal, including names of defense counsel. Attorneys representing
three defendants - Oscar Gustavo Perez-Bernal, Itzayana
Guadalupe Perez-Bernal and Susan Fiorella Ayala-Chavez - did not
respond to requests for comment.
    In the Ohio case, federal prosecutors in 2019 alleged that a
family-owned network of three cell phone stores in Columbus
offering money-transfer services had moved $44 million in
illicit drug profits to Mexico between 2013 and 2019 in
transactions that never exceeded $1,000. Those shops - Express
Cellular, Los Rosales and Los Rosales 2 - sold very little
merchandise and were essentially money laundering fronts whose
real clients were traffickers of heroin, fentanyl and marijuana
who paid the owners up to 10% of each transfer, prosecutors
said. The money was wired in the names of phony senders, the
indictment said, and went to Nayarit, Jalisco, Michoacan and
Sinaloa, Mexican states that are strongholds of organized crime.
    Among those who pleaded guilty were four family members who
operated the cell phone stores: Jose Luis Rosales-Ocampo, Josue
Gama-Perez, Thania Rosales-Guadarrama and Dulce
Rosales-Guadarrama.
    The four were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to
12 years. Attorneys for the defendants did not respond to
requests for comment.
    Federal prosecutors in Missouri last year unveiled charges
against purported participants in an alleged $4.7 million
conspiracy to distribute heroin, fentanyl and methamphetamines
on U.S. soil and send some of the proceeds to Mexico via
remittances. Among the 44 people charged were the owners of
three small Kansas City stores from where prosecutors say drug
money was wired. The three proprietors – Ana Lilia
Leal-Martinez, Ana Paola Banda, Maria de Lourdes Carbajal, all
Mexican nationals – pleaded not guilty.
    Banda’s attorney, Henri Watson, said “the case is complex
and the government has not yet furnished all the discovery
needed to adequately defend the case.” Lawyers for Leal-Martinez
and Carbajal did not respond to requests for comment.
    No money-transfer companies whose independent agents were
ensnared in the dragnet were charged in the eight federal cases.
Still, prosecutors in those cases mentioned several of those
firms in court documents because they said the defendants had
used their platforms to wire drug money.
    The companies mentioned were: Texas-based DolEx,
Florida-based Girosol, Boss Revolution (owned by New
Jersey-based IDT Corporation  IDT.N ), Miami-based Intermex
 IMXI.O , New Jersey-based Omnex, Ria (owned by Kansas-based
Euronet  EEFT.O ), California-based Sigue and New York-based
Transfast.
    DolEx, Girosol, Intermex, Omnex, Euronet and Sigue did not
respond to requests for comment. IDT declined to comment.
    Sangita Bricker, senior vice president of global
communications at payments giant Mastercard  MA.N , which
acquired Transfast in 2019, said the company uses the latest
technology and best practices to monitor suspicious activity and
report it to law enforcement authorities.
    At least four of those companies - Intermex, Ria, Sigue and
Transfast - became aware of potential drug money laundering on
their platforms and moved to stop it, according to a 2019
affidavit filed by an IRS investigator who assisted federal
prosecutors in taking down the Ohio cell phone store owners.
Each of the four firms investigated suspicious transactions
performed by one or more of the cell phone shops that used their
platforms, then terminated their agent agreements with those
businesses between 2015 and 2017 based on what they found, the
document said.
    Sigue, for example, examined 375 transactions performed by
Express Cellular from March to August of 2017 and found multiple
indicators of “wire transfers related to narcotics trafficking,”
the affidavit said. Among the warning signs noted in the
document: Nearly two-thirds of the transactions were sent to the
“high risk” Mexican state of Nayarit, a place renowned as a
center of opium poppy cultivation. And many of the transactions
were for amounts between $800 and $999, a range Sigue flagged as
indicative of “narcotics proceeds.” Sigue terminated its
relationship with Express Cellular in November 2017, the
affidavit said.
    The document did not indicate whether Sigue, Intermex, Ria
and Transfast launched their internal probes of the cell phone
stores on their own, or in response to federal law enforcement
officials investigating suspicious activity at those shops.
    Prosecutors and the IRS did not respond to requests for
comment.
    Some major players have been accused in the past of allowing
crooks to use their networks. In 2017, Colorado-based Western
Union  WU.N  agreed to pay $586 million to settle allegations by
the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission that
it failed to prevent criminals from using its service for money
laundering and fraud. As part of that deal, the company agreed
to strengthen consumer protections and improve oversight of its
agents in exchange for not being criminally prosecuted.
    In an emailed statement, Western Union said the company
“made significant investments in people, processes, and
technology” to fulfill its agreement with the government, which
closed the criminal case in March 2020.
    
    ‘MOST OF MY FAMILY HAS DONE IT’
    Barely 28,000 people live in the Sinaloan town of Costa
Rica, located about 35 kilometers south of Culiacán, the state
capital. It is an area of low migration to the United States,
according to Mexican government data. Yet Costa Rica boasts a
thriving financial cluster: Six branches of the country's main
banks are located there, as well as convenience stores,
pharmacies and other retailers where residents can pick up
remittances.
    In a visit to the town last year, Reuters saw at least five
people on motorcycles, wearing fanny packs and accompanied by
bodyguards, collecting cash from people exiting branches of
Banco Azteca, Banorte  GFNORTEO.MX  and BanCoppel located on the
poorly paved main drag. Six locals told Reuters these couriers
worked for the Sinaloa Cartel picking up drug money sent as
remittances, without elaborating further.
    Juan de Dios Gámez, the mayor of Culiacán whose municipal
jurisdiction includes the city of Costa Rica, did not respond to
a request for comment. A spokeswoman from the office of Sinaloa
Governor Rubén Rocha referred Reuters to the federal Attorney
General’s office, which did not respond to a request for
comment.
    Grupo Elektra, which owns Banco Azteca, told Reuters in an
emailed statement that it goes beyond the standard regulatory
requirements to protect against money laundering and fraud by
using technology that allows the bank to do real-time background
checks on those using its services. The company said it has its
own financial intelligence unit that "permanently" shares
information with Mexican authorities that it did not name.
    Still, it acknowledged that it was difficult to weed out
people who are paid to perform transactions on behalf of someone
else.
    “No institution is completely protected from people who
individually and illegally charge commission to act for others,"
the statement said.
    BanCoppel declined to comment. Banorte said it hadn’t
identified any money laundering cases through its remittance
payment system, but said it had the tools to stop any attempt to
do so. Banorte did not provide further details.
    Costa Rica is not the only community whose residents say the
Sinaloa Cartel hires locals to launder money via remittances.
Across Sinaloa, 49 people familiar with this activity – many of
whom have participated themselves – told Reuters it’s a common
side hustle for residents. A mother from El Tepuche, a small
rural town about 18 kilometers outside Culiacán, said she had
been cashing remittances for the Sinaloa Cartel for four years.
“I've done it, most of my family has done it," she said.
    While U.S. officials are increasingly concerned about the
use of remittances to move drug money, López Obrador has
stressed the importance of the vast and growing sums being sent
from the United States. Mexico last year received the second
highest amount of remittances globally, behind only India and
surpassing China, according to the World Bank. Remittances last
year accounted for 4.3% of Mexican GDP, nearly double the
percentage from 2015, government data show. Almost 2 million
Mexican households received remittances last year, according to
Mexico’s central bank.
    “This goes to the poorest people,” López Obrador said at a
Feb. 2 press conference in Mexico City, where he praised migrant
workers for sending remittances.
    His office did not respond to requests for comment about law
enforcement allegations that Mexican cartels are using
remittances to launder drug money.
    Mexican think tank Signos Vitales examined the recent surge
in remittances and concluded that increased migration alone
cannot explain the rapid expansion. “Money laundering, closely
related to drug trafficking activities,” appears to account for
at least some of the growth, the report said.
    That March 2023 study pointed to a variety of data points
that Signos Vitales analysts found highly unusual. Among them:
    *Eight U.S. states with relatively modest numbers of
residents of Mexican origin showed outsized growth in
remittances to Mexico between 2018 and 2022. The biggest outlier
was Minnesota. Senders using money-transfer services there last
year wired $4.7 billion to Mexico, or 8% of the 2022 total,
according to central bank data, ranking Minnesota third behind
only California and Texas, and ahead of states such as Arizona,
Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico and Nevada, all places
with significantly higher numbers of Latino residents. Minnesota
is home to roughly 200,000 people of Mexican descent. They all
would have had to send an average of around $23,000 each to
approach $4.7 billion, a “powerful reason” to doubt that workers
alone could manage to send such high levels of remittances to
Mexico, Signos Vitales said.
    *In the first nine months of last year, 227 Mexican
municipalities received so many money transfers that every
single household in those places could have received at least
one remittance per month. “Statistically speaking, such
phenomena are unlikely,” Signos Vitales said. Collectively,
those places received $10.5 billion, or nearly 25% of all
remittances sent to Mexico in the first three quarters of 2022.
    Signos Vitales also found hundreds of municipalities that
have only started receiving money transfers in the past few
years. Among them is Oquitoa, a hamlet of around 500 people
located in a region of Sonora state dominated by the Caborca
Cartel. As recently as 2017, Oquitoa registered no remittances.
Last year it received $2.5 million, central bank data show.
    "There is a lot of information that…at the very least,
raises suspicions of some kind of illegal activity," said
Enrique Cardenas, president of Signos Vitales.
    The offices of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and state
Attorney General Keith Ellison did not respond to requests for
comment.
    
    SHOT DEAD
    In Culiacán, the former house cleaner who began cashing
remittances for the Sinaloa Cartel in 2014 said she had
initially been nervous about getting involved with narcos, but
did so “out of necessity.”
    She had recently returned with her daughter to Mexico from
the United States and was struggling to live on her $150 monthly
earnings when a neighbor suggested a way to make some easy
money.
    Her initial cut of $230 went towards paying that month’s
rent. Soon, she was retrieving remittances regularly, but no
more than three times a month, a limit imposed by the cartel.
Sometimes, her handlers messaged that she must "take a break"
for a few months, she said.
    The woman said she received about 1% of each remittance she
cashed. But a good chunk of her total earnings - around $8,000 -
came from bringing others into the ring. She said she was paid
$40 a head for people she recruited herself, $20 for each person
her enlistees brought in, followed by a final payout of $10 per
person from the next layer of the pyramid.
    She said the work hasn’t made her rich, but it has made life
a little more comfortable. "We used the money to improve the
house," she said.
    One of her direct recruits was a Sinaloan truck driver in
his 50s, who told Reuters he eventually brought his daughter in
on the action. He said she and other younger recruits used Albo,
a Mexican fintech, or mobile payments company, to receive money
for the cartel.
    The daughter’s activities cast light on how new banking
technology offers traffickers fresh ways of laundering money, a
trend confirmed by security experts and 13 smurfs who said they
cash remittances for the Sinaloa Cartel. Some fintechs offer
app-based services that wire money internationally in seconds,
and provide users with a debit or credit card to make purchases
with those funds.
    Albo works with WorldRemit, the London-based money-transfer
firm, to enable people in the United States to send remittances
to Albo users in Mexico. The truck driver said he stuck to the
traditional method of cashing remittances at banks and retailers
because he wasn’t as familiar with smartphone apps.
    He said his daughter received the transfers via a virtual
wallet on the Albo app. Then she would transfer the funds
electronically to a bank account number passed to her by the
cartel over WhatsApp. He showed Reuters an Albo debit card with
his daughter’s name on it that he said had been linked to the
virtual wallet.
    Albo didn't respond to requests for comment. WorldRemit said
it uses market-leading security features to fight suspected
financial crimes on its platform, without providing further
details.
    The truck driver said his daughter cashed remittances for
the Sinaloa Cartel for three years. Then, in June 2019, two
unidentified men shot her dead.
    The father suspects the money that had landed in her Albo
account had proved too much of a temptation for her. In the
months before she was killed, he said, she moved to a new place,
upgraded her wardrobe, replaced her smartphone and bought a new
television.
    "They shot my daughter, here in front of my house,” he said.
Reuters viewed a copy of her death certificate. It said she died
of gunshot wounds.
    The man said he still cashes remittances for the Sinaloa
Cartel. He’s afraid they’ll harm him if he stops.     
 
 

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How Mexican narcos use remittances to wire U.S. drug profits
home    https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/mexico-drugs-remittances/
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 (Reporting by Diego Oré in Culiacán, Mexico;
Additional reporting by Michael Berens in Chicago and Drazen
Jorgic in Mexico City;
Editing by Marla Dickerson and Stephen Eisenhammer)
 ((Diego.Ore@thomsonreuters.com;))