Because apparently, money laundering is a regular feature of all kleptocracies, even the US, noting that Trump did buy John DeLorean’s New Jersey golf course, now Trump National Bedminster NJ.
So when folks like rMoney and tRump complain about nations manipulating currency, they’re just mad that they got aced out by bigger players.
And then there’s the entire digital currency (quasi-)criminal community that is part of the Deep Web.
Then there are those excessive payments for artwork, houses, and the things Trump is worried about in those tax returns.
Apparently it’s so ubiquitous that the Latvian bank publishes a DIY manual for those wishing to fabricate paperwork to cover the laundering.
The Mexican cartels have waged a particularly violent war against their commercial enemies, and some of the families of their victims are suing these money laundering banks in court.
However, that didn’t stop Donald Trump Jr. from visiting Baltic International Bank in 2012.
After the election, Baltic International Bank’s major shareholder Valeri Belokon was implicated in a money laundering scheme in Kyrgyzstan and has been in a series of high profile court cases in the UK.
The same year Trump Jr. visited his Latvian banker friends working for the Sinaloa Cartel, news reports indicate that the cartel has recruited the MS-13 gang as muscle, like this murder in Minnesota.
Ironically, President Trump named the MS-13 gang as public enemy number one, today.
Donald Trump Sr. had a very public fight with El Chapo in July 2015, just after launching his run for President of the United States.
In fact, the evidence suggests running successful casino or hotel/condominium enterprises for investors has never been Trump’s core business. The stocks for Trump businesses have been a terrible investment: he is described as a “stock market disaster.”[xii] His businesses have however successfully provided unprecedented opportunities for people around the world to launder dirty money. The fine the Trump Taj Mahal received for “substantial and long standing” money laundering violations was the largest ever levied against a casino.[xiii] This is where Trump has distinguished himself. Perhaps those who view Trump as a failed businessman simply do not understand his core business.
The concerns about Trump’s involvement with money laundering were given an exclamation point with his appointment of Wilbur Ross to be Commerce Secretary.
The National Memo notes that Ross served as the Vice Chair and leading investor in the Bank of Cyprus,
the largest bank in Cyprus, one of the key offshore havens for illicit Russian finance. Ross has been Vice Chairman of this bank and a major investor in it since 2014. His fellow bank co-chair evidently was appointed by none other than Vladimir Putin…since the 1990s Cyprus has served as one the top three offshore destinations for Russian and former Soviet Union flight capital, most of it motivated by tax dodging, kleptocracy, and money laundering.
founderscode.com/…
An investigation by McClatchy and reporting partners, involving interviews with officials representing legal matters against the accused in four countries, reveals:
- Ukraine has recently asked Switzerland to extradite Ilyas Khrapunov, son of former Kazakh Energy Minister Viktor Khrapunov, for alleged computer hacking.
- Ilyas Khrapunov and his wife secured unusual diplomatic posts representing the Central African Republic in Geneva, a move that helped provide them with a means of travel.
- Court documents tie Felix Sater — a Trump associate, Bayrock partner and twice-convicted Russian émigré — to some of the Khrapunovs’ transactions.
- Kazakh authorities asked the United States for information on Bayrock as part of the ongoing attempt to recover funds.
- A New York court decision may further reveal details about the Kazakh family’s financial flows into condos in the Trump SoHo building, developed and sold by Bayrock. Bank records include large transfers from a now-sanctioned Cyprus lender.
Have you been distracted yet? ... pay no attention to kleptocracy in the White House.
"Documents also instruct clients how to write plausible fictitious contracts to support wire payments 'in the light of stricter requirements from the regulatory organs'.
eng.lsm.lv/…
"Documents leaked to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) from Latvian banks appear to offer instructions to clients on how to use fake offshore companies associated with the bank to launder money or evade taxes," the report says.
"Riga, the Latvian capital, has long been home to a thriving offshore banking sector that has helped criminals and corrupt officials to siphon stolen money from the former Soviet countries," it adds.
REPORT
If the money laundering Latvian bank hadn’t celebrated Donald Trump’s improbable election, we might never have known his son met with a money laundering banker for cartels and Russians so daring, that he marched openly into the world of international sport and started spreading cash everywhere.
Trump Jr.’s ties are President Trump’s ties since the younger is merely an agent of the Trump Organization family business — which is wholly owned by Donald Trump Sr.
Neoliberalism requires an unprecedented and enormous expansion of the criminal justice system
The cybercriminal market usually comprises a set of “services” and “products”, used for various illegal actions in cyberspace. These “products” and “services” are offered to users of dedicated online communities, most of which are closed to outsiders.
The “products” include:
- Software designed to gain unauthorized access to a computer or a mobile device, in order to steal data from an infected device or money from a victim’s account (the Trojans);
- Software designed to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the software installed on a victim’s computer (exploits);
- Databases of stolen credit card data and other valuable information;
- Internet traffic (a certain number of visits to a customer-selected site by users with a specific profile.)
The “services” include:
- Spam distribution;
- Organization of DDoS attacks (overloading sites with requests in order to make them unavailable to legitimate users);
- Testing malware for antivirus detection;
- “Packing” of malware (changing malicious software with the help of special software (packers) so that it is not detected by antivirus software);
- Renting out exploit packs;
- Renting out dedicated servers;
- VPN (providing anonymous access to web resources, protection of the data exchange);
- Renting out abuse-resistant hosting (hosting that does not respond to complaints about malicious content, and therefore does not disable the server);
- Renting out botnets;
- Evaluation of the stolen credit card data;
- Services to validate the data (fake calls, fake document scans);
- Promotion of malicious and advertising sites in search results (Black SEO);
- Mediation of transactions for the acquisition of “products” and “services”;
- Withdrawal of money and cashing.
Payments for such “products” and “services” on the cybercriminal market are generally made via an e-payment system such as WebMoney, Perfect Money, Bitcoin and others.
All of these “products” and “services” are bought and sold in various combinations in order to enable four main types of crime. These types can also be combined in various ways depending on the criminal group:
- DDoS attacks (ordered or carried out for the purpose of extortion);
- Theft of personal information and data to access e-money (for the purpose of resale or money theft);
- Theft of money from the accounts of banks or other organizations;
- Domestic or corporate espionage;
- Blocking access to data on the infected computer for the purpose of extortion;
According to Kaspersky Lab experts, the theft of money is currently the most widespread type of crime. The rest of this report therefore focuses on this segment of the Russian-language cybercrime market.