U.S. DEA cooperates with local police to crack down on Sinaloa cartel money laundering organization
(Hanoi = Yonhap News) Correspondent Park Jin-hyung = Mexico's largest and most notorious drug organization, the Sinaloa Cartel, was caught laundering money in virtual currency in Cambodia.
According to the Associated Press on the 22nd (local time), Mears Birit, Secretary-General of the Cambodian National Anti-Drug Commission (NACD), announced that about $7 million (approximately 9.72 billion won) worth of virtual currency related to the Sinaloa cartel was seized in the country.
According to Director-General Birit, Cambodian drug enforcement police cooperated with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to crack down on four locations in the capital Phnom Penh and nearby Kandal Province from the 1st to the 5th.
As a result, a drug manufacturing laboratory and storage facility were discovered, several people involved were arrested, and related assets, including virtual currency, more than 200 kg of drugs, and more than 1 ton of precursor chemicals, which are raw materials for drug production, were confiscated.
The U.S. Embassy in Cambodia also issued a statement, saying that through cooperation between Cambodia and the DEA's New Jersey branch, they "successfully uncovered a local organization that was laundering virtual currency on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel."
Cambodia serves as a transit point for drugs produced in the Golden Triangle (border area between Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand).
In particular, as it has emerged as a country with the world's largest concentration of criminal complexes (fraud workshops) along with Myanmar over the past few years, fraud and money laundering using virtual currency have also become prevalent.
In May last year, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on Cambodian financial company Huiwon Group on charges of laundering at least $4 billion (about 5.55 trillion won) in illegal funds, including $36 million (about 50 billion won) in virtual currency, which was the proceeds of online fraud, and at least $37 million (about 51.4 billion won) in virtual currency stolen by North Korea through hacking.
In October of last year, the US and British governments sanctioned Prince Group and Chairman Chen Zhi (38), who were identified as the biggest masterminds of the Cambodian criminal complex, on charges of fraud and money laundering through virtual currency, and confiscated about $14 billion (about 19.4 trillion won) worth of related Bitcoin.
According to a report last month by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), several transnational criminal organizations outside Southeast Asia, including Latin American drug cartels, are also involved in large-scale trafficking of methamphetamine and cocaine in Southeast Asia.
The report explained that Latin American drug cartels' activities in Southeast Asia "appear to go beyond simply supplying drugs or chemicals for drug production," and that "the region is now serving as a supply, fund management, and logistics center for a number of Latin American criminal organizations."
The Sinaloa Cartel is considered one of Mexico's two largest drug cartels along with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), and the U.S. Donald Trump administration has designated both as foreign terrorist organizations.
