Human Trafficking

The U.S. government is threatening to downgrade Fiji to the lowest tier in its global human trafficking rankings unless authorities take “decisive action” against a religious group linked to human trafficking and transnational organized crime, OCCRP reported. 

Wildlife traffickers are funneling dirty money through the same financial pipelines used for such illicit activity as human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, and the illegal sale of weapons around the world, according to new University of Waterloo research cited by CBC News. 

Federal prosecutors examined Jeffrey Epstein for money laundering and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business in 2007, according to emails from the deceased sex trafficker’s personal Yahoo account obtained by Bloomberg.

New class-action lawsuits allege that Bank of America and BNY Mellon enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking of underage girls, in part by failing to report suspicious activity linked to the financier until after his death in 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported.  

U.S. and UK authorities seized roughly $15 billion in Bitcoin and multiple London properties allegedly linked to a sprawling online fraud scheme based in Cambodia.

Illegal gold mining has grown into one of the Western Hemisphere’s largest and fastest‑expanding illicit economies, out‑earning narcotics in parts of Colombia and Peru and pushing conflict‑linked gold toward U.S. ports and banks. 

Jeffrey Epstein remained embedded in Wall Street’s elite financial networks in the years before his 2019 death, maintaining accounts at more than 20 banks and executing large transactions with prominent investment firms, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal. 

JPMorgan Chase processed more than $1.1 billion in transactions for Jeffrey Epstein over a 15-year period, despite repeated anti-money laundering (AML) red flags raised internally, according to an investigative report by The New York Times.