4th Anniversary of Ross Ulbricht’s Sentence The end of May marked the 4th Anniversary of the sentencing of Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, the founder of the now-defunct darknet marketplace website based in California, called Silk Road that operated on TOR, which brokered sales of illegal goods and services, including narcotics like heroin, weapons, [...]
Canada now has its first official drug kingpin and its a company in Ontario. The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) yesterday designated a Canadian company as part of a significant foreign money laundering organization and drug trafficking organization. The Kingpin Act is used for the most serious of designations [...]
Working with Europol, several law enforcement agencies shut down a Bitcoin mixing and anonymizing service called Bestmixer, which was one of the largest mixing services for digital currencies. Mixing and anonymizing services or anonymizing exchanges process digital currencies on behalf of customers in order to make it difficult to trace them. The purpose of preventing [...]
Last week, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC“) designated several people associated with the most powerful drug cartel in Mexico, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (meaning the new generation cartel of Jalisco), as drug kingpins. Added to the drug kingpin sanctions list is a Mexican Judge, Isidro Avelar Gutierrez, who is believed to [...]
The US Department of Justice for the Western District of Pennsylvania announced the unsealing of a federal indictment in Pennsylvania of two Israeli men who are alleged to be the co-owners and administrators of the website Deep Dot, which charges them with conspiracy to commit money laundering in association with that website. The site acted [...]
The Bulgarian police have seized a transport truck from Iran attempting to cross the Bulgarian – Turkey border with 288 kilos of pure heroin, with a street value of $15 million at the low end. The heroin was dry-walled, meaning each brick of heroin was covered individually with drywalling material. According to the US 2019 [...]
Canada once again a “Major Money Laundering” country The 2019 “International Narcotics Control Strategy Report” (INCSR) published on Friday by the U.S. Department of State identifies Canada once again as a “major money laundering country” along with a host of risky countries for financial crime. A “major money laundering country” is one whose banks and financial [...]
A Vancouver man, James Ellingson, is the subject of an extradition request by the US, based on charges that include money laundering and narcotics importation from the Southern District of New York (“SDNY“). Ellingson was arrested in Vancouver on October 29, 2018, under an Extradition Act provisional warrant. According to the SDNY, Ellingson sold drugs on the [...]
Notorious Sinaloa cartel Andrew Hogan, a former agent of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), who, as part of a multi-agency task force that included Homeland Security Investigations, successfully hunted and located the most wanted cartel leader in the world, El Chapo Guzman, says that when monitoring the Sinaloa’s activities, they [the DEA] were most surprised [...]
A foreign national from France, known on the dark net as OxyMonster, was sentenced to 20 years jail in the US for selling drugs such as fentanyl, online, and laundering the proceeds of crime. Gal Vallerius, 36, pleaded guilty to drug distribution and money laundering in Miami in June for selling cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl, oxycodone and [...]