The new boss? Not the same as the old boss
In the good old days, all a money launderer had to do was take a bag full of cash into a bank, hand it over, and walk out with a cashier’s cheque. Annoying rules and regulations have long made that kind of thing difficult/laborious, but fortunately for launderers they now have crypto-for-cash brokers who do the same job.
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We’ve seen the same pattern all over the world — a criminal hands cash to a middleman, and receives cryptocurrency in exchange — but rarely has it been so well explained as in this affidavit attached to the indictment of Jorge Figueira, a 59-year-old Venezuelan charged this month with laundering more than a billion dollars.
In some ways, this was a very old-fashioned scheme, with funds derived from the South American drugs trade being shuttled between as many as seven different accounts to confuse any pursuers before being transferred to their recipients. Were it not for the crypto element, this could have happened at any time since the 1980s, but it is the crypto element I want to focus on: and, once again, it was Tether’s USDT.
“Basically, it is used for what we are doing,” said Figuera in a tapped phone conversation transcribed in the affidavit. “It is used to transfer money in a quick way, even to make it get to jurisdictions that have some type of issues, etc. For example, to send it to China… Let me be clear with you, (USDT) is used a lot for laundering money.”