How Drug Enforcement Agencies Track Drug Dealers and Terrorists Using Money

As we all know, it is very difficult to catch drug dealers from drugs. But what people may not know is that drug enforcement agencies have also tried to track drug dealers from drug money.

In the early days, paying in large denominations of U.S. dollars was the favorite method of payment for drug dealers. At present, among all the US dollar cash in the world, banknotes with a denomination of US$100 account for 80% of the total cash, and there are not many people who use hundred-dollar cash in daily life, even the US Federal Reserve Board (hereinafter referred to as the “Fed”) It is not known where the money went. In the 1990s, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan set up a special team to investigate the whereabouts of hundred-dollar bills.

The eldest sister of the team leader is Ruth Judson. She spent several years leading several agents all over the world to search for large dollar bills, but the efficiency was too low. It just so happened that there was a brother in this team who was a biology student, and he remembered the way people used to estimate the number of fish schools in the past. This method is to first catch 100 fish in the lake, put them back into the lake after painting all of them, and then randomly catch 100 fish to see how many fish are marked. After counting several times in this way, you can roughly know the proportion of marked fish in the 100 fish caught, and you can also calculate how many fish there are in the lake.

Therefore, after the issuance of U.S. dollar bills, the team used technical means to track their flow, and they found that two-thirds of the hundred-dollar bills flowed overseas, while overseas banks and currency exchange agencies only kept a very small part of them, most of them The hundred-dollar bill became an intermediary for underground transactions. After all, the $1 million in cash is not heavy. It can be lifted with one hand and a gun with the other. The image is very “social”.

Therefore, in order to increase the financial costs for criminal organizations, economists propose that the issuance of 100-dollar and 500-euro banknotes be discontinued. Ordinary people generally do not use banknotes of such a large denomination. It is more convenient to use bank transfers for legal transactions. Only such large denominations of cash are needed for criminal activities such as tax evasion, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. However, on the one hand, the Federal Reserve is reluctant to part with this seigniorage; on the other hand, civil rights organizations believe that regulators cannot be given the power to fully supervise the movement of funds. Therefore, the United States still retains the $100 bill.

But even having an abundance of $100 bills can still be inconvenient for large criminal organizations. Many institutions specializing in money laundering have emerged as the times require. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration once opened a special bank in order to find out the flow of drug funds.

This bank called RHM is registered in a small island in the Caribbean Sea, and its purpose is to investigate a big drug lord named Pablo Escobar Gaviria. Known as “the most wanted criminal of the 20th century”, he has money and guns, and has even been on the Forbes rich list.

In order to make the bank they opened not to be suspected, the police set the money laundering price slightly higher than the black market level. However, RHM Bank quickly became a brand among drug dealers in South America, because the bank laundered money safely and quickly, and never had an accident-after all, it was opened by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The police also really got a lot of valuable clues from it. For example, if they want to know the real owner of a certain fund, they only need to delay the payment for two days, and the other party will naturally call anxiously.

The movement of large amounts of suspicious funds at the bank drew the attention of the OCC. Officials shut down RHM Bank’s money transfer business and interviewed RHM Bank’s president, a Drug Enforcement Administration officer. Of course, after explaining the situation, the bank’s business was quickly restarted.

However, RHM Bank soon went out of business. Because it was so successful, it won praise from criminal organizations. As a result, many colleagues of drug dealers—human traffickers, killers, gangsters, etc. have come to RHM Bank to launder money. However, RHM Bank has no right to investigate other criminal activities other than drug trafficking. They can only accept business from drug dealers. Obviously, it won’t take long for its true identity to be revealed. So, the bank eventually went out of business.

Interpol and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration used the clues provided by this bank to arrest more than 100 drug dealers, and gained a lot. More importantly, this move reduces the channels for drug dealers to launder money. They can no longer trust similar money laundering agencies because they cannot tell whether they are run by the police.

The big drug lord Pablo was not arrested because of this, and the strict structure of the drug trafficking organization made it almost impossible to follow through. However, he died in a shootout in Colombia a few years later, but did not die well.

The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) also used economic models to find and examine terrorists.

As early as the “September 11” terrorist attack in 2001, some people were already distributing the national wealth of the United States. Three days before the attack, the market was trading 286 times more short on U.S. airlines than usual. Abnormal transactions related to the aviation industry have appeared on many exchanges around the world. A newly registered account directly made tens of millions of dollars in profits during the “9.11” incident, and no one has claimed the money so far.

It doesn’t need to be an expert, ordinary people can also see that someone must have known in advance that this attack was going to happen.

Therefore, since 2005, the CIA began to collect clues in the stock market.

A successful attack will inevitably cause the stock market to plummet. As long as you short in advance, you can make a fortune; even if the attack fails, you only need to follow the normal process to get the money back, which is foolproof.

It is difficult for people to resist the temptation to get rich 100% of the time.

This is not to say that terrorists will short stocks before blowing themselves up, but they also have family members, friends, classmates, and Abor who sells snacks downstairs. Terrorists will brag when they drink too much, and will explain the funeral to their families before leaving.

Just imagine, even the scam of “I, Qin Shihuang, send money” can work, what’s more, if you “accidentally” know that your brother is going to bomb the World Trade Center tomorrow, the U.S. stock market will suffer a sudden crash, and short selling will definitely make you violent. rich.

There are a large number of U.S. stocks. If every second transaction is monitored, the amount of data is too large. So the CIA selected more than 400 stocks related to terrorist attacks, such as cruise lines, hotels, airports and other stocks, and monitored their daily transactions.

Abnormal transactions are actually very conspicuous. Most stocks are going up, but suddenly an airport stock goes down; or the stock of a train company, which is usually ignored by no one, is suddenly sold short in large quantities, which is a warning.

These abnormalities may be caused by unexpected events. For example, if a major customer suddenly cooperates with a competitor, then this kind of transaction is also reasonable.

But if there is no relevant news, and the stock is suddenly sold short, then it is obvious that someone knows something that others don’t.

In August 2006, the model successfully predicted a liquid bomb attack on London. The attack was planned to detonate 10 planes in the air, killing two to three thousand people. The CIA and the London Police captured dozens of terrorists.