Introduction
Money laundering generally refers to financial transactions in which criminals, including terrorist organizations, attempt to disguise the proceeds, sources or nature of their illicit activities. Money laundering facilitates a broad range of serious underlying criminal offenses and ultimately threatens the integrity of the financial system.
The United States Department of the Treasury is combating all aspects of money laundering at home and abroad, through the mission of the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI). TFI utilizes the Department's many assets - including a diverse range of legal authorities, core financial expertise, operational resources, and expansive relationships with the private sector, interagency and international communities - to identify and attack money laundering vulnerabilities and networks across the domestic and international financial systems. In recent decades, U.S. law enforcement has encountered an increasing number of major financial crimes, frequently resulting from the needs for drug trafficking organizations to launder large sums of criminal proceeds through legitimate financial institutions and investment vehicles.
Cornerstone is Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) initiative to detect and close down weaknesses within U.S. financial, trade and transportation sectors that can be exploited by criminal networks. Law enforcement entities share criminal typologies and methods with businesses and industries that manage the very systems that terrorists and criminal organizations seek to exploit. This sharing of information allows the financial and trade community to take precautions in order to protect themselves from exploitation.
The El Dorado Task Force consists of more than 260 members from more than 55 law enforcement agencies in New York and New Jersey – including federal agents, state and local police investigators, intelligence analysts and federal prosecutors. The El Dorado Task Force is headquartered at the New York Special Agent in Charge Office and at other locations in the New York/New Jersey Metropolitan area. The Task Force targets financial crime at all levels. Task force agents educate the private financial sector to identify and eliminate vulnerabilities and promote anti-money laundering legislation through training and other outreach programs. Prosecutors use a full range of criminal and civil laws to prosecute targets and forfeit the proceeds of their illicit activity. The El Dorado Task Force uses a systems-based approach to investigating financial crimes by targeting vulnerabilities such as the Black Market Peso Exchange and commodity-based money laundering. ICE leads investigations against corrupt foreign public officials who have used U.S. financial institutions and other investment vehicles to facilitate criminal acts involving the laundering of proceeds from public corruption.
Trade-based money laundering is an alternative remittance system that allows illegal organizations the opportunity to earn, move and store proceeds disguised as legitimate trade. Value can be moved through this process by false-invoicing, over-invoicing and under-invoicing commodities that are imported or exported around the world. Criminal organizations frequently exploit global trade systems to move value around the world by employing complex and sometimes confusing documentation associated with legitimate trade transactions. ICE established the Trade Transparency Unit initiative to target trade-based money laundering worldwide.