One thing that cannot be overemphasized in the crypto industry is the ability to make anonymous transactions using several digital assets. With this potential in place, it has opened the industry up to a lot of malicious players in several industries. While most of them still prefer to carry out their transactions using cash, others have now brought themselves up to speed with the use of several digital assets, especially privacy-focused tokens.
According to a recent report that was filed by Mexican authorities, Cartels across the country are now using digital assets to mask illegal payments. In the report that was put forward by Reuters, the malicious players have been operating across the Latin America region for a while now using several digital assets to launder illegal funds.
Cartels are now using crypto to make cross border payments and transfer
In the report, Reuters quoted an official of the Finance Ministry’s intelligence unit, Santiago Nieto, where he described the rate at which the cartels were using digital assets to launder funds as alarming. Giving a detailed explanation into how the cartels were using the digital assets to launder funds across the border, Nieto said that they would deposit the exact threshold amount of $7,500 into several accounts belonging to them. Furthermore, they would proceed to acquire little bits of digital assets which in most cases is Bitcoin before sending the payments across the borders.
Also read:Notably, the $7,500 threshold is the exact amounts that a person needs to deposit so that the bank will flag that particular transaction. According to a recent law that was passed in Mexico in 2018, crypto exchanges across the country were mandated to report any crypto transactions that exceeds $2,800 (56,000 pesos). According to several news outlets at the time, law enforcement hoped that they would be able to check the illegal activities that malicious actors perpetuate using cryptocurrencies.
Cyber investigations do not have enough staff to respond to threshold alerts
The law that was passed in 2018 seemed to have been effective as authorities captured Ignacio Santoyo, an individual that was involved in human trafficking in 2019. According to the records of authorities, Santoyo alongside his sister acquired Bitcoins worth $22,000 from Bitso, a crypto exchange in the country.
Another win for law enforcement was when they nabbed Hector Ortiz, the Head of a famous Cyber hacking syndicate across the country. According to law enforcement, they discovered that the Head of the Bandidos Revolution team was at the time making massive amounts of Bitcoin purchase, giving law enforcements enough reason to arrest him at the time.
Showing his frustrations at the turn of events, the Head of the Cyber investigations unit of the Attorney Generals office in Mexico, Rolando Rosas has noted that the country does not have enough resources to go after the malicious actors laundering money through crypto in the country.
Furthermore, Rosas lamented that they had only 120 staffs and they have not been able to respond to several alerts that they have gotten from crypto exchanges across the country. Rosas also faulted the coronavirus pandemic as one major influence in the increase in the rate at which crypto-related offences were on the rise across the country.
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