Money laundering allows drug traffickers, smugglers and other criminals to expand their operations. This drives up the cost of law enforcement and health care (e.g., treatment of drug addictions).1
Internet access greatly facilitates the free and easy exchange of ideas, opinions, and unedited and nonrefereed information about recreational drugs. Electronic bulletin boards, chat rooms, and question-and-answer forums convey a myriad of drug information to our nation's populace.2
"Surfing the net" provides access to many elaborately designed Web sites that contain considerable information about a variety of recreational drugs. Many of these sites provide information on newer drugs of abuse, the so-called club drugs, such as MDMA (E, Ecstasy), GHB (G), and ketamine (K, special K); newer designer drugs, many of them hallucinogenic amphetamines; as well as more established drugs such as dextromethorphan and marijuana.2
Adolescent use of these Web sites may have a direct impact on their drug-taking behavior.2
Research Excerpts
"Jurisdictions should... determine the money laundering threats inherent in new or developing technologies, such as smart cards, electronic banking, etc., and take necessary measures to prevent their use in money laundering schemes.1
Media Quotes
"The drug lords have deployed advanced communications encryption technologies that, law enforcement officials concede, are all but unbreakable. They use the Web to camouflage the movement of dirty money. They track the radar sweeps of drug surveillance planes to map out gaps in coverage. They even use a fleet of submarines, mini-subs, and semisubmersibles to ferry drugs -- sometimes, ingeniously, to larger ships hauling cargoes of hazardous waste, in which the insulated bales of cocaine are stashed. High-tech has become the drug lords' most effective counter-weapon in the war on drugs -- and is a major reason that cocaine shipments to the United States from Colombia hit an estimated 450 tons last year, almost twice the level of 1998, according to the Colombian navy."3
"Archangel Henao is the man whom authorities credit with much of the drug runners' recent technological progress. According to Colombian and U.S. narcotics officials, Henao heads the North Valley Cartel, the largest and most feared criminal organization to emerge from the chaos that gripped Colombia's underworld after the old Medellín and Cali cartels were broken up in the 1990s by the country's military -- with extensive U.S. help. To scrub his profits, he and fellow money launderers use a private, password-protected website that daily updates an inventory of U.S. currency available from cartel distributors across North America, says a veteran Treasury Department investigator. Kind of like a business-to-business exchange, the site allows black-market money brokers to bid on the dirty dollars, which cartel financial chiefs want to convert to Colombian pesos to use for their operations at home."3
