Approximately $300 billion is laundered annually through the United States, most of it connected to fraud and drug trafficking, the Treasury Department said on Friday in its 2015 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment.
Since the last assessment was issued in 2005, Treasury said that the Internet has become a much bigger source of risks such as identity theft. It also said that some drug-related money laundering has been shifted to the United States from Mexico after U.S. banks cut off several Mexican money services businesses over the past several years.
Among key AML risks Treasury cited were cash transactions, structuring, disguised account ownership and complicit actors within merchants and financial institutions. Treasury also noted the risk of “occasional AML compliance deficiencies, which are an inevitable consequence of a financial system with hundreds of thousands of locations for financial services.”
